


Sight and Seeing

by mightbewriting



Series: The World of Wait and Hope [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, F/M, M/M, Romance, Seers, Slow Burn, blaise isn't great at communicating, draco is still trying so hard, hermione's memory loss really messed up everyone's year, pansy is the only one with her shit together, theo is a bit of a mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-05-30
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:14:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 34,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24077326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mightbewriting/pseuds/mightbewriting
Summary: He glanced at the dark corner of the lab, a type of breathing blackness that moved even when it didn’t, the very air and space and void of the darkness slowly expanding and contracting as the thing within it watched him. Theo flicked his wand, sending a key soaring toward the dark corner, clattering against the stone wall he could not see. Another flick, another careening key. Over and over and over again until one keygoingremained on the bench.“A point for going, today,” Theo mused.Without a care to the hour, and only modest curiosity about his destination, Theo picked up the key and activated it, hurtling himself somewhere, anywhere, but there.A Theo POV companion story toWait and Hope!
Relationships: Theodore Nott/Blaise Zabini, background Draco Malfoy/Hermione Granger
Series: The World of Wait and Hope [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1737079
Comments: 314
Kudos: 1023





	1. The Vernal Equinox

**Author's Note:**

> Hello and welcome to Theo's little adventure! Theo's story can be enjoyed without having read [Wait and Hope](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22818646), but I highly recommend reading W&H first. Otherwise, it's spoiler city up in here! 
> 
> HUGE thanks to [icepower55](https://www.fanfiction.net/u/9423984/icepower55) and [EndlessMoonChild](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EndlessMoonChild/pseuds/EndlessMoonChild) for reading this nearly as many times as I have and ridding it of its typos, inconsistencies, and ridiculous run-on sentences. Any remaining problems are totes my bad. Additional thanks to [NuclearNik](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nuclearnik/pseuds/nuclearnik) for providing a last set of fresh eyes to calm me!
> 
> Happy reading! I truly hope you enjoy!! <3

**A Friday: January 5th, 2007**

Theodore Nott measured his life in Fridays. They were his favorite days: a predictable segment of the week when his haunted family manor could play host to something light, forcing its darkness back to the corners where it waited. There had been a time, notably the entirety of 2006, when Fridays became the centerpiece around which Theo built himself up, a way to dig his way out of the easy isolation his ancestral estate could offer— had offered— in the immediate aftermath of a war he’d wanted no part of but that shredded his family name regardless.

In his more self-pitying moments, Theo liked to lament the burdens he bore: crimes of a dead father, carried by a living son. _So dramatic_. Sole heir to a once revered family name, now quietly dismissed in polite company and openly reviled in the impolite. He didn’t allow himself such thoughts too often, not when he was but one of many from old families whose futures had all taken a sharp turn for the worse in the last decade. 

But sometimes indulging in the drama of it helped. Just barely. 

So on this particular Friday, per tradition, Theo prepared for all manner of raucous fun-having with his friends. That was the only requirement, truly. Fridays were for fun and fun only. It made no difference to Theo whether that fun came in the form of gambling (via Pansy, utterly ruthless), alcohol (via Blaise, usually in tandem with nicotine), muggle history lessons (via Hermione, but only after several drinks), or idiotic attempts at inebriated dueling (via Draco and Theo, just because they could). 

What Theo did not expect on the first Friday of a new year was for Harry Potter’s patronus to find him in the middle of the afternoon with an urgent message. Even if it had come at the prediction of Blaise’s extremely underwhelming party trick as a subpar Seer, Theo still wouldn’t have expected any kind of missive from Harry Potter. Because Harry Potter only knew of Theo’s existence by virtue of Hermione and Draco’s association. And they most certainly weren’t on _summons in the middle of an afternoon_ terms. 

Theo’s spine ached as he stooped over the workbench in what was once his late father’s vault of illegal objects and occasional experimentation lab. The space had been warded centuries before behind several layers of repellant magic, a blood lock long since outlawed, and a trick portrait that Theo felt added just the right amount of whimsy. The hidden room could only be accessed by blood relatives of the Nott family with knowledge of the correct spells to pass through the extensive and dangerous wards. _Honestly excessive._

It took Theo almost five years to break through the defenses because his father had gone and gotten himself killed on the wrong side of a war without showing Theo how to access it. Not that Theo had ever expected his father to share a fucking thing with him, especially access to Nott Manor’s most guarded vault. Centuries of auror raids had failed to find and dismantle it. The Dark Lord didn’t even know of its existence when he used the manor to house a whole slew of second-rate snatchers and Death Eaters who hadn’t warranted an invitation to the Malfoy Estate. It was the prize of Nott Manor and therefore something that Theodore Nott Sr. likely had no intention of ever sharing with the son who did nothing but disappoint him. But Theo certainly wasn’t bitter about that fact in the slightest. 

So Theo broke in. It took much longer than expected: Draco got bored after two years, Blaise only sat around and smoked, providing extremely unhelpful feedback to the point where Theo wanted to snap his wand in two, and Pansy didn’t even bother pretending she cared.

But once Theo cracked it and could finally enter the room his father had kept from him, something he ought to have had a right to based purely on his birth, he found— nothing. The dark, cavernous space in the bowels of the manor had apparently been gutted. Only the evil lurking in the shadows remained: fixed in the dark, haunted corners of the room that taunted Theo like all the other shadows in the manor, except the shadows here had teeth. And when Theo talked to these dark corners, told them to fuck off and leave him alone, occasionally they talked back.

Theo turned the vault into a workspace of his own, a place where he tinkered with the magical objects that interested him, with the only things that held his attention during his endless days as lord of an empty estate and a dying family.

So as Theo stood, fiddling with one of the hundreds of illegal portkeys that he most certainly would _not_ be telling Hermione he’d been working on, a bright silver stag galloped through the stone walls and stopped directly in front of him. For a silent moment, Theo stared at the stag as it stared at him, suddenly overcome by jealousy for a bit of magic he doubted he’d ever be able to master. He didn’t much care for things being beyond his reach.

But Theo was not built for things like patronuses, not for the feelings meant to fuel them. 

Then Harry Potter’s voice shouted at him from the stag’s mouth.

“Get to Malfoy’s _now—_ ” his voice cut off before resuming again, gruff and distant, sounds of something clattering in the background. “ _Fuck_ , Malfoy? Nott— now. Get here now. Bring a portkey to St. Mungo’s.”

As Theo apparated, instantly and without hesitation at the boy wonder’s command, Theo questioned how much time it took for a patronus to deliver a message and how much trouble he was in if Harry _fucking_ Potter knew about one of his many illegal portkeys.

—

Hermione had blood on her face. She sat slumped against the wall in the hallway of her flat, breathing heavily. The door to the guest room lay on the ground nearby, ripped from its hinges; an explosion of debris spilled out into the hallway. _Fuck._ She’d hidden all his illegal shit in that room and, from the sound of it, Harry Potter, auror on the rise, was already inside. 

Hermione blinked up at him, her eyes didn’t track him quite the way they normally did, usually so alert and assessing. Theo knelt beside her, inspecting the blood on her face and the clouding in her eyes. He forced himself to swallow the nausea. 

“Is this yours, Granger?” he asked, summoning a towel from the kitchen and attempting to clean the mess. His stomach twisted. He really, truly, hated the sight of blood.

She stared at him, a touch too long, before she answered with a shake of her head. 

“Draco,” she said. “Draco’s—”

And as if summoned by the sound of his name, Theo heard a growl and string of curses from what sounded like an exceptionally angry Draco Malfoy. 

“Quit fucking touching me, Potter—”

“How else do you expect me to get you out of here?” Potter said, his voice tight but controlled.

Theo stood and took the half step required to peer around the corner into the guest room. It looked like a herd of erumpents had stampeded through it, indiscriminately smashing everything inside to dust. On the far side of the room, Potter had Draco partially levitated, partially slung across his shoulder.

Theo had to turn around, the sight of whatever was happening on Draco’s chest, drenched in blood, immediately sent Theo’s head spinning.

“Point of clarification, is anyone actually dying right now?” Theo asked. He smashed his eyelids together in an effort to erase the crimson nightmare on his friend’s chest from his immediate memory.

“No,” Draco ground out. “Just a lot of fucking pain.”

Theo felt his fear uncoil just enough; he could handle a maiming. 

“In that case, _fuck_ — Draco. We’ve talked about this. No bleeding around me,” Theo said, struggling to find his balance between an impulse towards humor and the appropriate gravity in a serious, though evidently not life threatening, situation. Theo stared at the picture hanging on the wall across from him, delaying having to turn back around and face the scene in that room for as long as possible. 

“I will hex you,” was all Draco said. He’d forced his words through a heavy grunt, followed by a groan, and then something Theo might cautiously label a whimper. All in all, he appeared to be in a tremendous amount of pain. Which wasn’t surprising, considering the amount of blood soaked into Theo’s retinas. 

The exasperated noise from behind Theo sounded like it came from Potter.

“Nott— do you have the portkey?” Potter asked in a level tone, remarkably calm as Draco released another groan.

Theo blew out a breath, patting at his pockets, brain suddenly stalled for where he’d stashed it just moments before he apparated from his workshop. All he could think or see behind his eyelids was the blood, and what looked suspiciously like bone poking out around Draco’s collarbone. Theo swallowed back an impulse to gag, pulling the portkey from the back left pocket of his trousers. He braced himself and turned back to the mayhem.

“I’m not asking where it came from, Nott,” Potter said with his surprising control. “Just toss it here so I can get Malfoy to the hospital. Bring Hermione through the Floo, yeah?”

So much fucking blood. And the mess. A room in tatters.

“Theo,” the command in Potter’s tone pulled Theo out of his own head. “Can you do that? Hermione needs medical attention too. I have no idea which of their experiments got on her. But I need to take Malfoy now so _toss me the portkey_.”

Yes sir, Auror Potter, sir. 

Theo set a two second delay on the portkey and threw it to Potter. Theo didn’t bother waiting to see if he caught it. The man had been a seeker after all, now was his moment to put that skill to the test; Theo turned to Hermione.

“I’m feeling a little fuzzy, Theo,” she said, looking up at him from where she had her head leaned back against the wall, both hands planted against the floor beneath her. She took a deep breath, holding it in her chest as Theo knelt beside her again. “How did Draco look?” she asked as she released the breath, head swaying against the wall.

“Bloody. I’m displeased with him.”

The noise Hermione made sounded somewhere between a laugh and a groan.

“If you’re joking he must be okay—” her voice caught. “There was _bone_ , Theo.”

Theo held the revulsion in his throat, distressingly close to a gag.

“No need to revisit it, Granger, I was lucky enough to witness. Let’s just get you to St. Mungo’s, shall we?” 

Theo wrapped her arm around his shoulder, supporting most of her weight as he tried to help her to stand. He had to adjust as he pulled her to full height; Theo’s tall, weedy build meant that Hermione’s arms could hardly reach his shoulders. 

“Around the waist, Granger, hold tight. Do I need to try carrying you?” He struggled, trying to find a way to support her with his rather inconsiderable strength. Athleticism had never been one of Theo’s key attributes. 

“No, I can stand,” she muttered, her voice distant. But Theo saw her do that thing she did, that _Hermione_ thing where she grit her teeth and squared her shoulders and told whatever it was getting in her way to _fuck off, thank you very much_. It was probably his favorite thing about the witch. “I told Harry he’s not allowed to ask about the portkey,” she continued, wobbly steps walking with him towards the fireplace. 

“Much appreciated, Granger,” Theo said. He wobbled in his efforts to keep her standing.

And once they’d travelled through the Floo, meeting with a team of healers on the other side, Theo bid her farewell, shaken but on the mend. 

Barely two weeks later she had no idea who he was.

—

**Definitely not a Friday: January 18th, 2007**

Theo hated hospitals. One trip to St. Mungo’s barely ten days earlier had been plenty of exposure, and on his favorite day of the week, no less. It was the lime green they wore, forever seared into his memory from the time he spent here in his childhood, watching his mother die, waiting for the moment that Theodore Nott Sr. became Theo’s only family. Even at nine years old, Theo had an idea of what that cold reality would look like. And the reality did not disappoint, or rather, it did: very much.

Pansy tapped her nails irritably against the arm of the chair to Theo’s right. On his left, Blaise had stolen another chair from the waiting area and used it to prop his feet up. He kept flexing his fingers, stress speaking through his hands. Theo almost reached out to stop him, to stop Pansy too, to try and offer his friends the same kind of comfort he needed for himself.

Across from them, Harry and Ginny Potter sat together, looking equally drawn and fatigued. In the narrow walkway between the two parties, Draco paced mercilessly, carving a canyon of grief in the tacky linoleum floors. It had been hours since Draco sat, minutes since he snapped, and mere seconds since he sighed.

Draco froze, eyes focused down the hallway towards the room where Hermione lay unconscious, victim to one of the many hazards of her work with dark artifacts. She’d been unconscious for nearly three days. 

Her healers stood outside the door conversing. They motioned to Draco, who immediately launched down the hallway, purposeful footsteps reverberating through the space. In an intrusive sort of musing, Theo couldn’t help but think how a few tapestries could help cut down on all that echoing. And his manor had plenty to spare.

Annoyingly, Potter also rose, making himself available near Draco. Theo ground his teeth together. Fucking friendship seniority. Theo cared too, they all did. But being Theodore Nott meant a different thing than being Harry Potter. 

Harry Potter commanded respect, got immediate attention from healers, expedited testing, received thanks for merely existing. He and Hermione existed in a state of general exaltation the rest of them could only hope to graze by proximity.

Theodore Nott, if recognized at all, mostly got uneasy stares, sneers, and not-so-subtle glances at his left arm, searching for a brand that wasn’t there. Only Draco had that _honor_. 

Draco’s raised voice snapped Theo’s attention to him. Potter had his hands on Draco’s shoulders, trying to steer him away from Hermione’s room. One of the healers eyed Draco with obvious caution before entering her room.

“What is it now?” Pansy said from next to Theo. Her voice lilted so close to a petulant whine that Theo almost felt like he was back at Hogwarts, sometime around fourth or fifth year when she thought that tone would convince Draco to sleep with her.

Theo stood, his body brimming with anxious energy, built up over three days of waiting, on and off, in and out of the hospital. And now, so close to when the healers planned to wake Hermione, his skin felt stretched and thin, ready to burst. 

He reached Draco and Potter three strides later, brows lifted in question.

“Ten minutes,” Draco said. He sounded winded, two simple words spilling with the force of a man brimming with adrenaline. 

“They’re waking her now,” Potter added when Draco didn’t continue. “They said Malfoy could see her in about ten minutes.”

Theo felt some of his tension sinking, slipping down between his vertebrae, a snake slithering down his spine. He could feel the muscles in his neck relaxing. He nodded. They waited.

Fifteen minutes later, the tension had coiled its way all the way back up Theo’s back, twitching and angry at every clack of Draco’s shoes and every turn in his pacing as he counted the passing minutes in furious footsteps.

“What the fuck is taking so long?” Draco half breathed, half shouted, mid-pace. His eyes searched them for an answer none could give. Draco released a sharp breath and left to speak— more likely shout— at the nurses. This Hermione-specific version of Draco knew no pleasantries, kept no manners, and would have made their collective society etiquette tutors aghast at his curtness. And there could be no stopping it. Theo didn’t even bother trying.

Blaise reached over, placing a hand on Theo’s leg, halting the frantic bouncing he hadn’t even realized he’d been engaged in. Theo glanced up at Blaise’s dark eyes, grateful for the escape from his own head.

“Me too,” Blaise said, giving Theo’s leg a small squeeze before retracting it, leaving traces of warmth and comfort in its place.

Draco started shouting from down the hall and Potter shot to his feet.

Theo had to resist the urge to roll his eyes. 

“He’s going to blow up eventually, Potter. Might as well let him.”

“We’re in public, Nott.”

“And?”

Potter just shook his head and jogged down the hallway where Draco had started screaming, fully out of control. Theo heard a nurse calling for security as the scene escalated. Potter pulled at Draco’s shoulders again, trying to halt a lunge towards Hermione’s door. 

“Where the _fuck_ is my wife?” Draco roared, shoving Potter off of him. The man had officially lost it. Theo felt halfway there himself, and he was merely a second-rate friend in the days’ rankings.

Ginny rose to her feet too, hovering partway between where Theo sat with Blaise and Pansy and where her husband tried and failed to hold Draco back. Theo tilted his head to better peer around Blaise at the sound of a loud crack. He’d be lying if he said he didn’t get a tiny bit of amusement out of Potter’s bleeding nose. Theo had tried to warn him. 

“He’s going to get himself stunned,” Pansy complained with a heavy breath.

“Yeah,” Theo said.

“Probably for the best,” Blaise added.

Theo looked down. Blaise’s hand was on his leg again, halting another series of anxious jitters. He kept it there this time; it helped. 

—

**Actually a Friday: January 19th, 2007**

“I cancelled drinks tonight because I wanted to be alone, Blaise,” Theo said, following the smell of smoke in his home that ever diligently alerted him to Blaise’s presence. On this particular evening, Blaise had chosen a sitting room in the east wing: home to an obscene number of tapestries depicting a variety of Goblin Rebellions Theo didn’t remember a single thing about. 

Blaise didn’t acknowledge him as Theo entered the room, he simply continued smoking his cigar, feet propped on a late eighteenth century coffee table. Under normal circumstances Theo would have kicked Blaise’s feet off the antique piece of furniture and doubled down on some admonishing.

But when the healers finally woke Hermione she had no memory of the last six years of her life. Which included her entire friendship with Theo.

So naturally, Theo wasn’t exactly in the mood.

“These tapestries are going to be ruined,” Theo sighed, sinking onto the sofa across from Blaise.

“Pity,” Blaise said, pulling a fresh cigar from his pocket. He sent it floating towards Theo, the closest thing to consolation Blaise probably knew how to offer. And in all honesty, probably the only kind Theo knew how to accept. “If they’re already ruined…” Blaise added, leaving his implications, as he often did, unspoken.

Theo rotated on the sofa, propping his legs up and laying back with his head on the arm. With a quick couple of spells he cut and lit his cigar, accepting several thousand galleons worth of tapestries as a total loss. They were too much of a hassle to have cleaned; he’d just sell them like he did with the rest of the textiles Blaise seemed to enjoy ruining.

“Have you talked to Draco today?” Theo asked as he stared at the ceiling above him. Often, he spent so much of his time focused on the dark corners of the manor living at eye level that he forgot how high some of the ceilings ran, and how shadowed and impervious to light they could be. The perfect hideaway for a demon laying in wait. He scowled.

“No,” Blaise said. “You?”

“No.”

This was why he wanted to be alone. Theo didn’t have the energy for conversation, his brain didn’t have the capacity for complex thought: not after three days of worry, of consoling his best friend on the verge of a breakdown, and of his own selfish grief over the news he’d been forgotten. And he knew his grief had nothing on Draco’s. Theo didn’t have the right to be upset, not like that.

“She doesn’t remember him,” Theo said in the silence of a room slowly filling with a cloud of smoke.

“Not how he’d like, no.”

Theo had to ask.

“Did you _See_ this?”

Blaise didn’t answer. In the following quiet that clawed across the space between them, as real as any noise, Theo wondered if he even asked the question at all. Or perhaps it had stalled in the space between genesis and exodus, lodged somewhere inside him. Theo rotated his head against the arm of the sofa so he could see Blaise’s face, attempting to decipher if he’d spoken, thought, or simply buried his words in a graveyard of better intentions.

Blaise looked at him with the lines around his eyes strung tight, a battle fought across his face to still his expression and suppress whatever emotion dared to be known. It was a rare slip in the utter unruffability that came with everything Blaise Zabini said or did. 

Theo found he didn’t know how to place what he saw. Had it been offense? Hurt? Resignation? Over fifteen years of friendship with Blaise didn’t make glimpsing behind his mask any easier. The look, whatever it was, faded.

“I don’t _See_ much,” Blaise finally said.

“Pity,” Theo said, parroting Blaise’s earlier words. 

“And if I had,” he said. “I couldn’t change it.”

“And you’re sure that’s how that works?” Theo asked. His friend rarely spoke of his occasional and self-described as _useless_ flashes of divination. 

“It has to be,” Blaise said, drawing a deep puff off his cigar before releasing a plume of smoke in front of him, obscuring any chance Theo might have had at witnessing any further wayward expressions. Theo turned his head back towards the ceiling, ornate molding obscured by darkness.

“The one you’re waiting for?” Theo asked quietly. 

Once, years before and plied with copious amounts of alcohol, Blaise admitted he’d seen something while they were still kids at Hogwarts, long before the burden of being idiot adults with no idea what they were doing found and saddled them. Even with lowered inhibitions and gratuitous bribery, Blaise wouldn’t share a single detail of what he’d seen. The curiosity got to Theo sometimes, a tickling in the back of his mind, reminding him that his friend had a secret he wanted to know. 

Because whatever it was, Blaise waited for it, hoping for it like it was the most important thing in his world. 

“Yeah,” Blaise said as the smoke cleared. 

—

**Not a Friday: February 3rd, 2007**

Just weeks later and Theo had gone restless, turned rabid, itching for the routines that once kept him comforted, that quieted the shadows in his home. Friday nights without Draco and Hermione had become sad, morbid affairs full of speculation, commiseration, and what was probably an inadvisable amount of alcohol.

Especially considering the amount of drinking Theo did with Draco in companionship of his pain, waxing poetic late into the night about his circumstances. Theo had no idea how to help, other than to offer access to his home and his liquor collection. 

And then there were the nightmares, a fresh take on his familiar friend. Instead of dreaming exclusively of the manor during the war, or his father, or his mother, Theo had started dreaming of Hermione and of the last time he’d spoken to her.

Theo might have tried harder to make that time with Hermione count had he known their trip to St. Mungo’s would be so final. He wouldn’t have handed her off to the healers so quickly. Wouldn’t have waved his goodbyes in a haste to wash his hands of the blood that had gotten on him before checking in with Draco.

 _Much appreciated, Granger_. What pathetic parting words. 

The worst was the embarrassment when he woke. Embarrassment for having had the nightmares to begin with. He had no right to be this affected, not when Draco had lost the most important person in his life and Theo had lost, what? A fifth of his friend group? 

Theo spent far too much time in the middle of the night talking to his demon in the darkness and tinkering with portkeys in his workshop, at a loss for how else to keep the nightmares and the guilt at bay. He used actual keys in his fiddling: brass ones, silver ones, antique ones, shiny and new ones, any key he could get his hands on, Theo turned into a portkey. 

He stared at them, lined up on the workbench in front of him as he sat on a stool. Low light from a single lamp illuminated the lab in the middle of the night, so late he did not know the hour: somewhere bleeding between what felt a little like morning, a little like night, and a lot like a dream.

The thing with teeth lurked in the shadows, taunting him with a silent presence.

On this night, the work bench held twenty portkeys _coming_ and twenty-two _going_ . Theo toiled on another one _coming_ , incapable of allowing the disparity between the two versions to grow too large. Twenty portkeys designed to bring him back to the manor, twenty-two to take him away. He couldn’t quite escape it, the need to vanish from this place, to leave in an instant in a blur of magic much more satisfying than a simple apparation. But the guilt drew him in again, the blood ties to this place that haunted him. So even as he made portkey after portkey designed to take him away, he almost always had to make its counterpart: the one that brought him back, straight to his bedroom or the parlor or the greenhouses. 

It was a therapeutic way to practice his very specific skill set. And a self-destructive way to remind himself of the trap that snared him. And he was annoyingly self-aware enough to realize it. 

He glanced at the dark corner of the lab, a type of breathing blackness that moved even when it didn’t, the very air and space and void of the darkness slowly expanding and contracting as the thing within it watched him. 

Theo flicked his wand, sending a key soaring toward the dark corner, clattering against the stone wall he could not see. Another flick, another careening key. Over and over and over again until one key _going_ remained on the bench. 

“A point for going, today,” Theo mused.

Without a care to the hour, and only modest curiosity about his destination, Theo picked up the key and activated it, hurtling himself somewhere, anywhere, but there.

—

**Also not a Friday: February 7th, 2007**

Sometimes in lieu of pointless brooding, Theo opted for pointless lounging. It was a brooding-adjacent activity, but tended to involve less self loathing and a little more self respect. On this particular night, it even involved a book, a warm fire, and a sitting room near the east wing kitchens that had yet to meet Blaise Zabini’s smoking habit. 

He nearly dropped his book at the sound of his own name shouted through the otherwise empty manor.

It immediately took him back. He knew Draco didn’t mean to do it, but his friend had the capacity to shout with such vitriol that there were moments where it reminded Theo so keenly of his own father’s voice that he had to forcibly shake the comparison from his mind. 

His father did not shout for him through the manor halls, not anymore. 

But Draco apparently did. 

Theo let his book fall closed. Not that he’d been enjoying it much anyway. 

“Theo!” the shout came again, closer. Draco had an uncanny ability to find Theo wherever he tried to hide in his sprawling manor. He suspected it had something to do with Draco’s own childhood in an expansive estate where one could literally shout in a dwelling occupied by several other people and never be heard.

More than likely though, Theo suspected his elves had little loyalty and ratted him out to Draco whenever he asked. 

Theo rose, walking to the dark corridor and peering into it.

Draco had only made it about halfway down the hall before slumping against a wall just shy of an offensively hideous bust of Theo’s great grandfather. He’d considered tipping the thing over to see how many pieces it might shatter into on a variety of occasions. Most of them inebriated. An alarming number of them sober. The piece was probably priceless.

“Draco?” Theo asked, walking to his friend with a sad sigh held inside his chest, knowing the action and sound of it would do no good. Not when this sort of mood had seized Draco’s senses. 

Theo stopped in front of Draco as he sat with his back against the wall, arms propped on bent knees, eyes seeking something from the ceiling. Theo called for an elf to retrieve a bottle of scotch and took his place against the opposite wall. 

When the elf returned with two glasses and a bottle of alcohol— admittedly a touch more expensive than Theo had planned on cracking into— it only took one glance at his distraught friend to deem the sacrifice worth the cost.

“Do you want me to cast some light in here or is this more of a dark corridor conversation?” Theo asked as he sent a glass of liquor towards Draco.

Even in the nearly pitch black corridor, Draco’s bright blond hair gave him away, flashing in the darkness. He released a morbid kind of laugh, reaching for the glass.

“Definitely a conversation for darkened corridors,” he said before downing in a single gulp what Theo had meant as a drink for sipping.

“Should I invite my demon? It loves the dark,” Theo asked, trying to get a feel for the severity of Draco’s mood.

He could feel Draco rolling his eyes in the dark, setting the glass down on the granite floor with a loud clink. The lack of grace told Theo this was not Draco’s first drink of the evening.

“Should I assume that dinner with team-Gryffindor did not go well?”

A sharp flash of blond hair in the darkness, jerked from left to right. Theo heard a pained inhale chased by an explosive exhale. On the tail end, a strangled sob.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Draco breathed, voice rough, as Theo imagined he did everything in his power to hold himself together. 

Theo simply summoned the tumbler from Draco’s side of the corridor and refilled it, sending it back in the darkness. Theo’s eyes had adjusted enough that he could see the defeated slump in the silhouette of Draco’s shoulders. 

“Weasley was there,” Draco finally said.

“Fuck,” Theo agreed. 

Draco hadn’t outright said it to Theo, but he knew the timeline well enough. If Hermione had lost six years of her memory, which included her entire friendship with Theo and romantic relationship with Draco, that also put her squarely back into a time where she was in a relationship with Ronald Weasley. 

Theo felt like vomiting out of sympathy. And then once again out of guilt for even daring to feel sorry for himself in all this.

“Do I need to plant a portkey on weasel to send him to the middle of an ocean somewhere?” Theo asked, only partly joking.

The following silence told him Draco might actually be considering murder.

“Lavender is pregnant.”

“So, no? Or after his wife gives birth?”

“ _Fuck_ , Theo.”

“I know, mate.” 

Theo immediately regretted saying it. He didn’t know. He couldn’t come close to knowing, with or without his own personal brand of nightmares about the situation that generated a very Theo-specific sort of guilt. 

He grasped for anything to shift the topic.

“Are you still sleeping on _that_ sofa?”

He’d hoped perhaps for a chuckle, a dip into morbid humor that served Theo so well. Instead, the dark silhouette across from Theo stilled, not even breathing. Theo held his own breath, waiting, a grotesque, twisted sort of anticipation swelling inside him with an impulse towards inappropriate humor. Anything to shove the discomfort away.

“She can barely even speak to me,” Draco finally said in a voice so quiet Theo nearly missed it. “What do you think?”

“A yes to sofa sleeping arrangements then, got it.” 

Theo grimaced in the aftermath of that confirmation. He jolted at the sound of Draco’s glass sliding across the hard ground.

“Another,” Draco said. His voice already heavy, weighed down by drink and despair. 

“How much have you had tonight?” Theo asked carefully, already opening the bottle.

“Pour me a fucking drink, Theo. My wife thinks she loves her ex.”

“Right.”

Theo sent the glass back across the hallway, refilled per the request turned command. In the passing silence, Theo could barely stand the roar of Draco’s thoughts across from him, practically shouting into the void. The stench of something in the darkness, his something with teeth, crept up on him. He couldn’t quite tell if he imagined it or if he could actually trust his own senses. Either way, he ignored it, breathed through his mouth, redirected his thoughts towards sunlight and garden parties and suggestive eye contact with strangers in crowded bars.

“You won her once, you know,” Theo tried, needing to break the silence.

Draco’s hollow laugh echoed with painful sharpness through the long corridor, striking with force at marble busts and silenced portraits.

“Hermione can’t be _won_. She has to be convinced. She requires evidence. A specific set of circumstances—” Draco’s words had started to blur, slurred on a heavy tongue. “I can’t make those circumstances again.”

“So make new ones.”

“I don’t know how,” Draco whispered in a voice Theo hadn’t heard for years. It was the same voice that followed him around all of sixth year. A voice just a breath away from defeat. Theo didn’t know how to help his friend then, and he didn’t know how to help him now.

So he poured him another drink and sat in a dark hallway until the sun started to rise on a different, but no less difficult, day.

—

**Friday: February 23rd, 2007**

“Drinks tonight?” Blaise asked without preamble as he apparated into the Nott gardens where Theo had been desperately seeking a midday nap. Theo cracked an eye from where he lay on a lounge chair. Blaise tilted his head, watching Theo and then added, “Wouldn’t you say February isn’t ideal garden weather?”

“Warming charm,” Theo said, wrangling whatever maudlin mood he’d been indulging in and reentering the stage play of his life. “And no, not tonight. I’m doing so much drinking with Draco I can’t even consider doing more with you and Pansy.”

Blaise shrugged, sitting on the adjacent lounger and casting his own warming charm.

“Inviting yourself to my Friday afternoon of dramatic lounging, are you?” Theo asked, entirely unsurprised.

“You have too much free time,” Blaise said.

“Managing an empty manor is grueling work, I’m exhausted, honestly. Hence my garden nap.”

Theo peeked at Blaise, who looked completely at ease with his feet up on the lounge chair, angled towards Theo, watching him intently. 

“Now is a great time for a cigarette, barely anything worth ruining out here. The upholstery on these loungers is barely older than I am, worth nothing.”

The corner of Blaise’s mouth twitched. A fleeting example of something approximately a smile, at least in Theo’s book. Theo couldn’t help but smile, watching it happen, which only forced Blaise to roll his eyes, the tug at the corners of his mouth pulling wider, entering smirk territory.

“Hardly seems worth it, in that case,” Blaise said, looking away and leaning his head back.

“Want me to call an elf for tea?” Theo asked, still watching his friend, stubborn arse always refused to give even an inch.

“Have you thought about getting a job?”

Theo blinked. That was not a yes or no to tea. That was an entirely different conversation in and of itself.

“I’m not qualified for anything.” Theo shrugged, allowing himself a heavy sigh and dramatic roll of his eyes.

“You got nearly as many NEWTS as Granger.”

“Yes, well, my practical skills— my tinkering— is decidedly illegal unless sanctioned by the Ministry and they are _not_ going to hire me.” Theo sat up, swinging his legs over the side of his chaise to rest on the ground, facing Blaise. He cocked a brow and gestured to himself, head to toe, “Death Eater progeny, entirely unhireable.”

“But very fashionable,” Blaise countered. “New shirt?”

“Your interest in my wardrobe rivals Pansy’s obsession with Granger’s, you know that?” 

“You should consider investing in more blues, good for your coloring.”

Theo snorted, shaking his head.

“You need a new hobby,” Theo said.

Instead of continuing the conversation, as most people might have done, Blaise simply offered a blasé kind of shrug, shoulder lifting, head tilting, brows rising and falling, all to say _if you say so._

Well, Theo certainly did say so. 

“I miss trawling with Granger,” Theo said instead of pushing, seeking something banal to power the conversation he was already going to have to do all the heavy lifting in. Blaise rarely seemed in the mood to converse with actual words; today appeared to be no exception. Boyfriend hunting with Granger in Diagon Alley served as a plenty light hearted conversation topic.

“Why not just go without her?”

Theo mock gasped, hand pressed to his heart in outrage.

“And sully the sanctity of our traditions without her present? She would _never_ forgive such a transgression. Our Granger may be a benevolent mistress, but even her magnanimity has its limits.”

“Sometimes I wonder if you hear yourself when you speak.”

“And sometimes I wonder how you manage to engage in full conversation without me,” Theo shot, mostly playful.

Blaise shrugged again, always fucking shrugging. Such a non committal excuse of a response to half the things Theo said. He sent a glare in Blaise’s direction, a well-established signal that he was _doing it again_ and needed to actually use his gods damned words.

Blaise rolled his eyes instead of shrugging and Theo very seriously considered sending a stinging jinx in his direction. But he’d left his wand on the table just out of reach and he was far too lazy to reach for it.

“No boyfriend hunting without Granger, then?” Blaise asked with a practiced kind of disinterest in his tone, the kind of tone he used whenever Theo forced him to converse beyond his preferred limits. He’d invited himself to Theo’s attempts at dramatic mid-afternoon lounging, the least he could do was participate in five minutes of conversation.

“Hardly in the mood,” Theo said. “With everything going on, can you say you’re interested in trying to find some girl to sleep with?”

Blaise’s brows came together, a crease between them betraying a deep thought scrawled inside his skull, waiting for Blaise to interpret it by speech. 

“Most certainly not interested,” he said finally, slowly, and as opaque as ever. Honestly, having a conversation with Blaise sometimes felt like talking to a frustratingly sage but silent brick wall. If only there were a knowable series of steps— _three up, two across and Diagon awaits_ — to get him to open up. There was more there, Theo knew it, in almost everything Blaise said. But he had to obscure it with all his not-quite-Seer layers of obfuscation and truly, who has the time for all that?

So Theo did the generous thing and agreed. At least for now.

“Right. It’s not a good time,” Theo said.

“It usually isn’t.”

—

**Another Friday: March 16th, 2007**

It started innocently enough. 

By the time March rolled around, Theo had nearly driven himself mad talking to the dark corners of the manor, tinkering with specialized portkey designs— with devastatingly accurate results, thank you very much— and ignoring all of Blaise’s subtly unsubtle hints about getting a job or revamping his wardrobe. 

Out of options to occupy himself in a productive way, he offered to reinstate Friday night drinks, which served the additional benefit of getting Pansy to quit complaining about needing her back up friends.

“I swear, I’m this close to kidnapping her,” Pansy snapped as she stepped through the Floo, holding up her painted fingertips to illustrate the infinitesimal amount of space between Draco’s wishes and her own willpower.

“Who, Granger?” Theo asked, just to be certain they weren’t considering a different kidnapping he knew nothing about. He knew he was a bit out of the loop, but he wasn’t often that far behind on Pansy’s comings and goings. 

“Of course, Granger. My best friend who Draco is holding hostage from me, like _they’re_ the only ones affected by this.” She shrugged off her coat and handed it to a house elf. “I mean honestly, this whole story seems a little far-fetched to me, anyway,” Pansy continued, accepting a drink delivered by Blaise, who only raised a questioning brow towards Theo at Pansy’s small tirade. “Part of me thinks they’re just making it up to avoid us,” she concluded with a petulant huff as she landed in a seventeenth-century jacquard armchair Theo had already resigned himself to selling since Blaise’s arrival that evening, cigarette in hand.

“Pans,” Theo said, as serious as he could manage without wanting to cringe away from it. “Trust me, Draco is here almost every night. They are _not_ making this up.”

Pansy pursed her lips before releasing a long sigh, “yes, I know. I just— needed to say it. It’s all so— ridiculous. It’s just ridiculous.” She conveyed her conclusion of ridiculousness as if such a thing was the most offensive version of events imaginable.

Theo didn’t have the energy or the liquor stores to entertain a brooding session this evening, not with Draco slowly drinking him dry in his own desperation. As master of the manor, Theo forced the people and the conversation within it to his will.

“No more moping for you, Parkinson. Good times are the only times to be had here.” Excepting, of course, for all the times that did not include that moment, other Friday nights, and any time Blaise invited himself over. All the other moments, objectively speaking, probably could not be legally classified as good times. Theo might go so far as to say they were generally bad times. Always had been, probably always would be. 

And even as he forced his friends to socialize with him under a banner of false levity, ignoring comments from Blaise that his liquor collection could use some updating, which was entirely Draco Malfoy's fault, to be sure, Theo could not shake the words that Pansy had unknowingly branded into his brain.

 _I’m this close to kidnapping her_.

In concept, it wasn’t the worst idea to ever cross Theo’s mind. 

And so he did it. 

—

**The Vernal Equinox, not a Friday: March 21st, 2007**

It went better than expected. Granger remembered his name from school: win number one. She didn’t hex him after he’d delivered a little extra meddling for Draco’s sake: win number two. And she’d even gone home and put their conversation to work, judging by Draco’s near incoherent glee when he stepped through Theo’s Floo later that night, overcome by the simple fact that his wife had used his given name: win number three.

All those things considered, Theo should have been in an excellent mood. Draco had slipped back through the Floo mere hours before to return to his constant vigil on that wretched couch, leaving Theo pleasantly buzzed off exorbitantly expensive scotch and feeling like a generally decent friend.

The shadows disagreed. Haunting. Taunting. Vicious, vile, cruel. The thing with teeth hiding in the darkness usually spared Theo its presence outside the workshop, reserving the dissection of his character and his deservedness of his station in life for the hallows of Nott Manor’s most secret, hidden places.

But sometimes, when the thing with teeth felt restless, especially displeased with Theo’s continued existence, it wandered through the other shadows in the ancestral home, taking stock of the other ways in which Theo had failed. Not just in experimental magic, but in maintaining a manor, disciplining his house elves, acting as a proper friend. Anything and everything that might besmirch his character or deflate his confidence.

Theo woke, heart pounding, a violent beating against his ribs. He couldn’t have slept for very long, the sun had yet to rise and he could still feel the pleasant buzz and warmth of alcohol swimming through his veins. His stomach turned, his skin clammy. 

He could feel the thing with teeth watching in the darkness.

Theo never knew what to do in these moments, lying paralyzed in his lush, comfortable bed in his enormous family home, comfortable and wealthy and wanting for nothing, yet— drenched in fear, tense with a flame-like anxiety surging beneath his skin.

To get his wand and cast a _lumos_? Drive light into the darkness? Or to wait it out and hope the thing that stalked him passed, oblivious to Theo’s awareness of it in the dark. 

He tried to control his breathing, catching and stuttering and scratching against every muscle in his throat and every tooth in his mouth. Fitting that the darkness with teeth made him suddenly so aware of his own.

“I know you’re there,” Theo said to the blackness, a rush of alcohol and anxiety running him hot against his expensive sheets. “It’s amazing, the smell. I can always tell when you’re around, even though there’s nothing _real_ about you to notice.”

The darkness did not answer. It rarely did. But sometimes, Theo found he liked to be heard anyway, so he said the things he thought. The things he never said when he had the chance.

“Do you have a problem with my helping Draco?” Theo went on, staring at the ceiling above him. Exactly which part of the darkness the thing with teeth lurked in didn’t matter, Theo could pick any darkness and feel heard all the same. 

“Or is it his situation that’s offensive?”

A pause, a breath, an attempt to pull sight from the darkness. He couldn’t see anything, not beyond the nonsense tricks his eyes played on him in the absence of other input.

“Or is it the other thing?”

Theo wondered if his heart might burst from his chest, a spontaneous and violent introduction to the outside world by way of forcible exit. 

“I can’t help it,” he insisted in the dark. “I didn’t mean to think it.”

He hated the sob that tore through his throat, the one he tried to smash back inside with the palm of his hand, the one he clawed at his chest to quiet.

“I didn’t mean to,” he said again. The stench of the thing with teeth had gone. Even something so vile as his demon couldn’t bear the revulsion of Theo’s disgust. 

It had been a passing thought, an intrusive one, errant and unwanted and nevertheless as much a part of Theo consciousness as his desire for a good scotch or his affinity for Crookshanks. 

When he’d left Granger that afternoon, after what had ultimately been a lovely day reintroducing her to what their friendship looked like, he couldn’t help but wonder how nice it might be if he’d been the one to lose his memories, especially the difficult ones. If _he_ could forget, not just six years, but more. The war, his father, his mother’s death. All of it. 

And he hated himself for having thought it the moment it blinked into existence inside his mind. Because he was intimately familiar with the pain such an experience had caused his friends, and himself.

And yet— he’d thought it anyway. And he couldn’t stop thinking it, pulled thin but not snapping, stretched between disgust and desire. He hated himself for wishing to forget. And he couldn’t stop himself from wishing for it.

  
  



	2. The Summer Solstice

**The day after a Friday: April 14th, 2007**

The flash of the Floo startled Theo, pulling him from his thoughts. He’d just been considering the logistics of a little indoor fencing with the busts in the south hall when Draco stumbled out of the parlor’s fireplace looking simultaneously dazed and devastated.

It was only four in the afternoon. Theo tensed; Draco rarely showed up during daylight hours.

“What happened?” he asked before Draco had the chance to dust the specks of cinder from his trousers.

Draco looked up at him, eyes wide and round as if he hadn’t actually expected Theo’s presence. He didn’t answer. Instead, Draco lifted his hand in a failed attempt at communication via stunted gestures before he dropped it again. He walked to an armchair— seventeenth-century— and sat on the edge of it, immediately folding, head in his hands. 

Theo hadn’t moved from his place on the adjacent sofa.

“Draco?”

Spoken to the granite floors, hands muffling his words, “I think I kissed her.”

Theo sat straight, his casual lounge suddenly far too flippant for what felt like an imminently momentous conversation.

“I’m confused on the semantics,” Theo said. “You don’t know if you kissed her?”

Draco exhaled a strangled sound that started as a sigh and ended as a groan. He unfolded, dragging his hands across his face, eyes squeezed shut. 

“No, I mean— yes? Almost.”

“T for troll. Try again, that was awful.”

“It wasn’t really a kiss,” Draco said, mouth twisted into a frown when he looked up at Theo. “Just— barely. We fought.”

“Typically opposing moods, go on.”

“Can you quit being glib for ten fucking minutes, Theo?” Draco snapped. “ _Fuck_ . I need a drink. I think my marriage just blew up— _fuck_.” 

Theo shrank in his seat, hot, uncomfortable guilt erupting inside his chest, embarrassment coursing through his veins. He liked to toe the line, not cross it. 

“Sorry,” Theo said, watching as Draco’s face cycled through several expressions: a pull of the brows towards grief, a tensing jaw towards anger, a tight mouth towards sadness.

“She figured out we were trying for kids,” Draco started, face contorting. He drew a shaking breath and then froze, emotion flaking away in what looked like a last minute decision to employ his Occlumency. 

Theo hated this part, hated watching his friend morph into something solid as ice. Draco looked at him, a flash of regret in his eyes before that, too, vanished. “I have to,” Draco said in explanation, voice even in his occlusion. 

“She’s furious I didn’t tell her and I don’t know if she’ll forgive me,” Draco said in the same voice one might use to recite a grocery list. 

“And then you kissed her?” Theo asked, struggling to connect the two ideas.

He thought Draco had already sunk as deep into his Occlumency as he could get, but he shifted and stilled, eyes emptying entirely, a void where expression used to live.

“I think it was my last chance,” Draco said, inflection entirely absent. “I just— I just wanted one more. To remember.” Even through a massive, heavy-handed dose of Occlumency, Draco still struggled to force the flat, lifeless words from his lips.

Theo felt his throat tighten, overcome with sympathy for his friend. He didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t convinced there was anything he _could_ say. 

“I need a drink,” Draco said in the absence of verbal support Theo didn’t know how to provide.

“No,” Theo said.

Draco’s eyes shot to him.

“What?”

“Drop the Occlumency.”

“No.”

Theo sighed. How he’d ended up as an emotional anchor for his friend lost at sea when he himself felt like drowning on a daily basis, he truly did not know.

“You have to stop drinking this much. It’s not helping.”

“I don’t need you to tell me what to do,” Draco said, the edge in his tone only discernible through years of friendship.

“Yes, you do. Come on, we’re fencing.”

If not for the Occlumency, Theo imagined Draco might have cocked his head and offered a disbelieving smirk. Instead, Draco just stared at him and blinked.

“I haven’t fenced since I was twelve,” Draco said.

“The busts aren’t very good, you’ll be fine,” Theo said, rising. “And they make an exceptionally satisfying sound when they shatter.”

Hours later, with several centuries worth of marble busts in thousands of pieces all over the corridor leading to the solarium, Draco finally dropped his Occlumency. Then they began the hard work of strategizing how Draco could apologize to his wife, how he could better share the life they’d had together that only one of them remembered. 

Later, Draco retired to one of the manor’s many guest rooms entirely sober.

Theo stayed awake, seeking more busts to obliterate in the haunted halls of his home. When he finally found sleep, he was mind-numbingly drunk.

—

**The day after that, still not a Friday: April 15th, 2007**

Sunlight hurt. Sound hurt. The piece of sharp marble underneath Theo’s shoulder _definitely_ hurt. The insistent tapping at his right foot, well, that wasn’t so bad, all things considered. He supposed it was nice not to wake up alone.

“How hungover are you?” Blaise’s voice asked from somewhere outside Theo’s bubble of hurt.

Theo thought about speaking. He thought about opening his eyes. But even from behind closed lids dyed orange from an assault of sunlight, Theo knew the world would spin around him if he did. And not in a literal— the earth is always turning, such is the relentless passage of time— kind of sense, but in a somewhat metaphorical and extremely nauseating kind of sense.

“You’re still drunk, aren’t you?” came Blaise’s voice again.

It occurred to Theo that he was not in his bed, but rather, on a floor. 

He heard a sigh, bits of what he assumed were the remains of several busts skittering across the floor, and the sound of footsteps retreating away. With great effort, Theo forced his eyes open. With even greater effort, he managed not to turn the contents of his stomach out onto his fifteenth century Italian granite tiles. Theo pushed himself up so that he sat with his back against the wall, legs stretched out in front of him, head barely kept from drooping and lolling.

Theo took stock of his surroundings. Blaise had disappeared. Or perhaps Theo had only imagined him: a desperate cry for comfort by his subconscious. The room definitely spun. And his late night destruction of several priceless busts appeared to have been a very real thing and not just something he’d thought about in a cloud of liquor. His ancestors were all ugly anyway; he’d grown tired of their sneering faces. 

The sound of footsteps returned. Slowly, with care to keep the contents of his stomach on the inside, Theo turned his head in the direction of the noise.

He watched as Blaise approached, as poised and elegant as Theo was clumsy and disheveled. He knelt in front of Theo, easily balancing two potions in a single open palm. Theo's vision stopped swimming long enough to register a warm sensation stretching and yawning, wide and lazy inside his chest, awakened from a kind of slumber behind the brick wall he’d built around his heart. He blinked, fighting back the blur in his vision, eyes glued to Blaise’s frustratingly perfect face.

“One to sober you up. One for the hangover,” Blaise said. His tone was even, straightforward. Theo might have only imagined the disappointment hiding within it.

“Why are you here?” Theo asked. As if Blaise Zabini ever needed a reason to show up at Nott Manor. Some days Theo wondered if he ever left, or if he’d just claimed a place for himself in a different wing.

“Draco owled me. He wasn’t sure where you’d gone off to.”

Theo reached for the sobering potion, grabbing a touch too aggressively and nearly knocking both vials out of Blaise’s hand. In a single movement, Blaise rotated in his crouch and slid against the wall next to Theo, shoulder to shoulder. He set the hangover potion aside and unstoppered the sobering one. 

Theo leaned against Blaise’s shoulder and arm, willing his world to still. With better dexterity, he reached for the potion. Blaise didn’t release it, forcing Theo to look at him in question.

“You can’t keep taking care of Draco and not yourself.”

Well, that cut straight through Theo’s early morning intoxication and to the hidden, guilty parts of himself he preferred to avoid. Theo found it suddenly difficult to blink, motor functions stalled by the severity of Blaise’s stare. 

Blaise was so annoyingly right it landed like a physical blow, pummeling his pathetic rationalizations to a pulp. Theo wished his brain wasn’t so muddled, wished he’d already taken the sobering potion so he could fully process Blaise’s concern. But as it stood, his thoughts still sloshed around a soaked brain steeped in several bad decisions from the night before: the worst of which being the one where he didn’t follow the very advice he’d given Draco.

With better clarity of mind he might have laughed at the cycle they all seemed stuck in. Saving each other and never themselves. 

Blaise released the potion, still carefully watching Theo as he put the vial to his mouth.

“I don’t think I deserve you,” Theo said, the best sideways thanks his brain could manage.

“You do, I’m ruining all your textiles.”

“So gauche,” Theo mumbled. “I hate them anyway.”

“I know.” 

Theo tipped the potion down his throat, nearly gagging at the thick, sludge-like consistency as it slithered towards his stomach and sucked the alcohol from his blood. The gentle pressure of Blaise’s shoulder against his own reminded Theo that he definitely should not wretch.

—

**Also not a Friday, what a terrible month: April 26th, 2007**

Pansy Parkinson looked like a fucking queen. She acted like one too. Which was fine with Theo as he observed her regal posture in a sixteenth century armchair, reupholstered in the late eighteenth century. That particular piece of furniture very well _could_ have belonged to royalty at some point in its illustrious history. Theo’s family didn’t come to own it until the early nineteenth century when his grandfather and Draco’s grandfather had engaged in some kind of temporary furniture importing adventure.

Shame he planned to sell it, the matching sofa, and all the Goblin Rebellion tapestries in the room. Smoke damage was truly a bitch. 

And speaking of, Pansy had her legs crossed, hands in her lap, and an absolutely devastating stare aimed at Grimrok— or was it Rokgrim?— the cantankerous Goblin standing in front of Pansy like a peasant addressing his monarch. 

“That’s a laughable offer and you know it,” Pansy lobbed, not quite cruel, but nearing the edges of civility, even when dealing with Goblins.

_You tell him Pans. Gamble with Goblins. Win._

Theo had to stand out of the Goblin’s line of sight so as not to give away the amusement on his face as he watched Pansy’s spar with a creature known for its ability to drive a hard bargain. Theo slipped into a dark corner.

“There’s evidence of smoke damage—” the Goblin gave a slow, appraising sweep of the entire room with a sneer curling his lip. “—everywhere.”

 _Accurate, but uncalled for._ Theo frowned.

“Which is why we’re willing to part with them at an extremely generous rate. The tapestries alone, which bear particular significance to your cultural history, are worth the price. These exquisite antique sitting pieces are merely in our way and therefore part of the deal at no additional charge. Would you prefer we squabble over the value of the furniture too?” 

Theo knew bringing Pansy in to help sell his smoke-soiled textiles was a good idea. He’d lost enough bets to her, begged for better terms on more than one occasion, to know that she almost always got what she wanted. 

Theo leaned against the wall, crossing his arms and bending a knee to plant his foot on the paneled wood. He felt cold. 

He turned his head to find the thing with teeth, vile as ever, lurking in the shadows as well.

Theo lifted a brow as if to say, _disappointed?_

The thing with teeth said nothing. Redundancy in confirmation wasn’t required. It was always disappointed.

“We can throw in a couple portkeys if that helps. Right, Theo?”

_Wait— what?_

“How would we manage that, _Pansy?_ ” Theo asked, stepping out of the shadows with a push off the wall. Pansy had a brow arched at him, lining up perfectly with the blunt edge of her bangs. Perhaps that was how she determined their length: requiring just enough clearance for an imperious arch.

She turned her attention back to the Goblin, entirely ignoring Theo’s very legitimate concerns about offering his _illegal_ services as part of a business deal. Services he’d removed from commercial practice long ago, reserved exclusively for his personal purposes: all of them at least moderately self-destructive in nature.

“Two portkeys? Destination of your choice. Theo can have them to you by the end of the day.”

“Pansy I’m certain I have no idea _what you’re talking about_.”

She uncrossed her legs and leaned back into her chair, fingers of one hand tapping slowly, methodically, one after the other, against the armrest. She waited for him to come up with a better excuse than that. He didn’t have one. Any fond comments of Pansy Parkinson as a queen needed to be rescinded. She was a despot, drunk on power, certifiably evil and apparently trying to get Theo arrested.

As if he could _ever_ survive incarceration.

“Three portkeys and it’s a deal,” the Goblin said. “And they’ll be entirely untraceable?”

Pansy’s head tilted so minutely in Theo’s direction that the angle of her bangs didn’t even shift at the almost movement.

Theo realized the Goblin looked at him, too. Theo glanced from the Goblin, to Pansy, and back to the Goblin again. He sought consolation in the fact that Granger didn’t remember enough about him to be disappointed in what he was about to do. On second thought, that might be no consolation at all.

Pansy cleared her throat delicately, head tilting just a fraction more. Between the arched brow and the line of her burgundy painted lips, she evidently found the situation quite amusing.

“Yes, completely untraceable. My own invention, cuts down on the nausea, too.”

“Then we have a deal,” the Goblin said.

Pansy crossed her legs again, leaning forward in her chair, resuming her regal sitting position.

“Excellent,” her mouth curved into a smile, something wicked and calculated behind her exposed canines. “If I could interest you in any other priceless treasures, we have several other rooms with smoke damage.”

Theo rolled his eyes but considered reinstating Pansy’s royal status in his mind. He did appreciate the help, after all.

The Goblin just grumbled, waving her off with a disinterested gesture. 

“This whole monstrosity of an estate smells like smoke,” he said, sounding unamused. “It’s halfway burnt down as is. You’re lucky I’m buying these.” 

“And we do so _very_ appreciate your generosity,” Pansy simpered.

Theo snorted from his place as he sank back into the shadows, watching her attempts to open a new negotiation.

Halfway burnt down felt an awful lot like all the way condemned. He looked for the thing with teeth, wondering how long until the halls of his home would be deemed entirely unfit for occupancy.

—

**Sadly not a Friday: May 7th, 2007**

Theo’s day started innocently enough. He woke intent on doing a good deed for Draco, who’d been better recently but still a little unsteady at times. Apparently, Hermione had told him he didn’t need to come to her monthly appointment with her healers.

“You don’t think it means anything, do you?” Draco had asked the previous night as he scoured the manor’s library for any and every text related to healing, particularly that of the mind. It was a desperate task born out of idleness that Draco simply couldn’t stomach. Draco’s insistent need to check and recheck the library for potentially useful books seemed to grow strongest on the nights when sleeping on a sofa for several months got to him. Theo sometimes considered buying and adding new medical texts to the collection, just to give his friend a sense of accomplishment during these fruitless endeavors aimed at avoiding chronic back pain and general malaise.

Theo shrugged, “if she said it’s a waste of time because they’re not figuring anything out, then it’s probably just a waste of time.”

“Or she’s upset with me and doesn’t want me there,” Draco replied.

“Self-doubt is unbecoming on you.”

Draco ignored him, but Theo had already decided on his good deed.

And so when he surprised Hermione at St. Mungo’s after her appointment, intent on treating her to lunch and proving to himself, and ultimately Draco, that there was nothing to be concerned about, he hadn’t exactly planned on everything blowing up in his face.

The first problem was Blaise, sitting in a room off the east kitchens Theo had diligently tried to keep him away from. Theo was actually quite fond of some of the textiles there. The second, bigger problem, was that Blaise’s midday appearance at Theo’s house was actually indicative of Draco’s presence skimming potions supplies from the greenhouses. 

Somehow, Theo survived the bombshell of Draco learning he’d reintroduced himself to Hermione _before_ _she was ready_ — an assertion Theo wholeheartedly contested— without receiving a hex, jinx, or curse. The bad news was that Theo knew— he _knew_ — the conversation wasn’t over when Draco and Blaise had to go back to work. 

He’d expected a furious second round with Draco that evening. He hadn’t expected it with Blaise instead.

And he knew Blaise was furious from the way he didn’t say a single thing about it.

“We’re still doing Friday drinks, right?” Blaise asked after stepping through the Floo. Apart from a slightly tardy arrival to their standing social arrangement, nothing about Blaise’s demeanor suggested any sort of dissatisfaction. Which was exactly the problem. Theo had seen the confusion furrowed in Blaise’s brow before he’d left that afternoon, the question sculpted in his posture. 

“Right— drinks. Because it’s Friday,” Theo said, watching as Blaise considered his sitting options, ultimately deciding on one of the estate’s more expensive sofas, upholstered in a beautiful French brocade. 

“Your favorite day,” Blaise mused, pulling a cigarette from the silver case he kept in his breast pocket. Blaise muttered a spell and a small flame came to light at his fingertips, a useful bit of wandless magic they’d taught themselves one summer as teenagers with too much free time and a decent fascination with fire. 

He didn’t immediately light the cigarette. Instead, Blaise watched him, waiting for the objection that always came: _not on the jacquards, respect the carpets, you’ll ruin the tapestries, the smoke lingers._ Theo bit it back, maintaining eye contact, redirecting the dare back at his friend. What was typically an easy warmth in Theo’s chest whenever Blaise was around, sank and chilled in his stomach, churning with guilt.

With a small shrug— _a_ _fucking shrug_ — Blaise lit the cigarette with a deep drag and propped his feet up on the coffee table across from him.

Theo flinched as Blaise’s heavy heels landed on the delicate table’s glass top. This would be a conversation in two parts, then. How predictably Slytherin. Because while Blaise’s words said _drinks? Friday? Fun?_ His body language had finally slipped and said _why didn’t you tell me you’d been talking to Granger?_

Theo wasn’t entirely sure he had the mental fortitude required for a duplicitous conversation with his already difficult-to-decipher friend. He’d spent the afternoon with a considerable amount of stress coursing through his bloodstream in anticipation of whichever hex he expected to find himself at the receiving end of. Draco was furious; Theo knew it would only be a matter of time. 

Theo let out a slow breath, hating its wavering quality as he tried to wrangle his extensive jitters. He walked between the sofa and the coffee table. Gently, he nudged Blaise’s shins with his knee. Blaise didn’t look as amused as he normally did when Theo forced him to pretend he had respect for antiques. Regardless, Blaise dropped his feet, creating just enough space for Theo to perch on the edge of the table where Blaise’s shoes had been.

Blaise lifted a brow.

“I’m aware of the hypocrisy,” Theo said, shifting his weight and silently apologizing to the piece of furniture.

Blaise took another drag off his cigarette, leaned his head back and blew the smoke towards the ceiling. With a sigh, Theo reached out and plucked the cigarette from his fingers, taking an inhale. He figured if he was already all in, he might as well _really_ be all in. He’d just sell this furniture, too. 

Blaise barely blinked; he just reached for his silver case again and lit a new one for himself.

“Just say it,” Theo finally caved in the intervening and annoying silence.

“Say what?” Blaise asked.

“Fuck off, Zabini. I know you’re mad.”

Blaise shifted, leaning forward, brows raised. Their knees touched as Blaise moved, leaving less than a foot of space between them.

“What could I possibly have to be upset about?” he posed in an even, low voice.

Instead of answering, Theo found himself quite lost in the task of trying to differentiate pupil from iris in Blaise’s dark eyes, as if finding that seam could somehow unravel the conversation Theo didn’t especially wish to have. Blaise blinked, breaking the spell.

“And don’t bother making a snide comment about how I should have _Seen_ this. I didn’t. You know I rarely See anything.” He paused long enough to release a small sigh. “And you should really consider incorporating more blues into your wardrobe, this olive isn’t doing you any favors.”

“Had to soften the blow at the end there?” Theo asked, feeling his shoulders relax at the familiar insult.

“I don’t like being mad at you.”

Theo wilted. A resurgence of warmth in his chest comforted him.

“I didn’t tell Pansy because, well— she might order my execution. But I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to have to pick between me and Draco.”

Blaise furrowed his brows, looking at Theo for a long moment before he leaned back again.

“You think I would have told him?” Blaise asked. He heaved no accusation in the question, something closer to curiosity, but it felt damning all the same.

“I think you do loyalty better than the rest of us, and it would have been an impossible decision.” The creeping disgust of being so gods damned sincere made its presence known, a shivering feeling that shouted inappropriate quips at him from the recesses of his mind. A plea to put on a show, to perform. 

Blaise’s lips parted, syllables poised to form words from breath, but he closed them again: a rare reconsideration. 

And Theo wondered what he’d meant to say in the empty seconds where Blaise found his replacement sentiments. Part of Theo, a guilty part, realized he wanted to be picked. That, in the moment before Blaise said nothing, Theo had hoped he’d say _I would have kept your secret._ Even if it meant keeping it from Draco. 

“Pansy told me she sold the tapestries for you before she left for France,” Blaise finally said instead.

Theo ran a hand along the top of his thigh, short nails dragging against lightweight wool as he tried to decide if he felt pleased or disappointed that Blaise had already forgiven him. Because he had, that’s what a change in topic was, with Blaise at least. With Pansy, it usually meant she needed time to actively plan her revenge. With Draco, it usually meant he needed the opportunity to process and reflect. But with Blaise, letting it go truly meant letting it go.

What the fuck did any of them do to deserve this man?

“She did. Sold a few other pieces earlier this week, too.”

“You’re not going to have any furniture left if you keep selling it at this rate.”

“Only if you keep ruining it at this rate.”

Blaise smiled at that. A real, true, teeth-baring smile. Theo startled, just a little, but enough that he must have looked truly shocked by how utterly off guard the expression had caught him. Blaise rolled his eyes, smile still spread across his face. He stood, suddenly so close in what was already very little space between them, and offered Theo his hand.

“I don’t feel like drinking tonight. Let’s fence,” Blaise said, hand still outstretched in offering. “I’m not great, but I imagine I’ll put up more of a fight than the busts.”

—

**Still not a Friday: May 9th, 2007**

Not hearing from Draco the evening Theo’s betrayal became known had been stressful enough. Not hearing from Draco the entire next day had nearly driven Theo mad, forcing his frantic pacing between recently emptied rooms in the estate, his workshop where the thing with teeth watched him, and the hallways now devoid of their hideous busts.

He’d partly convinced himself that if he just kept moving, kept himself occupied, he wouldn’t give in to the impulse to Floo over to Draco’s and request a hexing just to put an end to the wondering and the waiting. 

Theo created eight new portkeys, four _coming_ and four _going_ , completely at odds with himself over which would serve him best, or which he needed more. He pocketed one of each, frustrated with the thing in the shadows, and sent the rest flying towards the dark corners. Not even his workshop helped to settle the creeping, crawling, gnawing guilt-turned-anxiety. 

He should have just told Draco. His reintroduction into Granger’s life had been a net positive, overall. But as much as Theo might have liked to emulate the kind of bravery Hermione dipped into as easily as breathing, he’d waited, he’d waffled. He’d considered confession for so long he’d completely lost the opportunity to act on it. He’d long considered impulsivity to be one of the worst aspects to that wild Gryffindor bravery the world praised so highly. But perhaps it was simply the mechanism of its success. He’d have to have been stupid and impulsive to confess his betrayal to Draco, and perhaps someone might have called that bravery. 

On his third day without retribution, Theo realized he’d subsisted almost entirely on caffeine since rising that morning. Exiting his workshop, he headed to the east wing kitchens. The elves tended to get exceptionally worked up if he didn’t take full, proper meals throughout the day, so he prepared himself for an uncomfortable amount of doting and what would probably be far more food than he needed.

Instead of anxious elves, Theo found a confusingly elated Draco Malfoy sitting on a barstool. An elf stood on the island in front of him, pouring a generous glass of red wine which Draco took with thanks. Theo almost flinched when Draco looked at him with an appraising stare.

“You only have two elves now?” Draco asked, taking a casual sip of his drink. Theo stopped, cocked his head, and had to engage in a dubious evaluation of the room, not trusting Draco’s tone. When Theo didn’t say anything, Draco continued. 

“You used to have four,” said as a statement, clearly intended as a question.

“One of Blaise’s wineries needed some extra help. And it’s just me here.”

The words felt perfunctory, almost unreal, and completely divorced from his action in speaking them. Why the _fuck_ wasn’t Draco mad at him? Blaise had been mad. Pansy was probably going to kill him when she got back from France. But Draco, he should have been more upset than the rest of him. They were _his_ wishes Theo disregarded.

Theo couldn’t take it anymore.

“Just hex me already,” Theo must have looked out of his mind as he made the request, eyes wide, body practically bouncing with nervous energy. “Just remember, none of the irreplaceable bits please— _fucking ow—_ ” Theo paused, massaging the after-effects of a stinging jinx on his left shoulder. “Did you just cast a nonverbal, wandless jinx while sipping on cabernet?”

Draco smirked and rolled his eyes. “Have I never shown you that before?”

“ _Why_ do you know how to do that? And no, you haven’t. And honestly, I’m a bit miffed. I thought we were best friends.” Theo released a huff as he took a set next to Draco, accepting a glass of wine from an overjoyed elf. 

“Should we compare notes on the things we’ve kept from each other?” Draco asked, in what really could have been a much more furious tone.

“I vote we skip that,” Theo said. “In all seriousness though, which I already abhor having to say, why am I still alive?”

“I kissed her,” Draco said, focused on the wine glass in front of him. 

“Again?”

“Properly this time.”

“Oh.”

“I probably owe you thanks for it, honestly.”

Theo opened his mouth and closed it again. Then, with more whine in his tone than necessary, “so why did you jinx me?”

Apparently Draco did not feel compelled to answer.

“She asked me out on a date after you two had lunch together. We went out last night.”

“And you kissed her?”

Whatever careful composure had been holding all of Draco’s elegance together shattered on a deep exhale. He set his glass on the counter, shoulders shaking as he laughed, an enormous smile stretched across his face. Theo had never considered the physicality of releasing long-held tension before, probably because all his own still wound like a serpent up his spine, coiled in and around his vertebrae, slinking up and down the vertical notches of his back. But witnessing whatever it was that just escaped Draco, a release like something Theo had never seen before, he found himself soaked in dangerous envy.

“I can’t believe I’d almost forgotten,” Draco said as if his manic laughter had been a perfectly normal reaction. Theo wasn’t even sure Draco knew he was doing it, but he had a hand at his heart, not-quite-clawing at the fabric of his shirt, an almost aggressive act of self-soothing.

“Forgotten what it’s like to kiss her?” Theo asked, wishing he hadn’t. He felt like he’d just waded into a murky body of water and he desperately wished he could see the bottom.

Draco took another sip of his wine, thanking the elf who appeared with plates of food for each of them. Theo frowned at the complicated French dish in front of him but said nothing. Draco’s longing for complex elf-made cuisine when he visited could very well lead to gout one day, but until then, Theo suffered in silence for the sake of his friend.

“Of course not,” Draco answered. “I doubt I could ever forget what it’s like to kiss her. But that feeling. Like something in here,” he put his hand to his chest again, that same kind clawing motion, “is trying to get out, get to her.”

“I truly have no idea what you’re talking about,” Theo tried to quip, his own chest suddenly aware of a familiar aching.

“You will,” Draco said, knowing enough of Theo’s spotty and unsuccessful romantic history not to bother asking if he was familiar with what it felt like to love someone the way he loved Granger. 

Theo snorted into a forkful of his fancy french food. The confidence was nice, but Theo had enough experience at failed boyfriend trawling with Granger to have realistic expectations about what future companionship looked like for him: a manor with haunted shadows.

“Unlikely,” he said, hating the bitterness in his voice. “The closest I’ve ever come to anything like that is when Blaise saves me from a particularly bad night of drinking.”

Draco shook his head and graciously changed the topic.

—

**A surprisingly stressful Friday: June 1st, 2007**

Theo was Innocent, entirely without blame, pure as a newborn foal. Or perhaps that was the stage play version of Theo talking, the one who hadn’t explicitly withheld from his closest friends that he’d betrayed the express wishes of one of them and hidden it from the other two. Really, Theo only wanted to spend his evening tinkering with his toys in the workshop while simultaneously insulting the thing with teeth as it lurked.

Instead, there came a pounding on the lab’s door, sharp and repetitious and dare he observe: entirely too aggressive for barely seven in the evening. Theo may have dropped most of the protective wards on the space, primarily over not wanting to engage with them every time he wanted access, but the requirement to carry Nott blood in one’s veins couldn’t be overridden. 

Which meant that whoever so desperately demanded his attention was not a blood relative (unsurprising; they were all dead) but knew the workshop existed (surprising; it was a small pool of people.).

Theo hoped it was Blaise but had a feeling it would be Pansy.

For fun, Theo sent a volley of incomplete portkeys flying into the dark corner where the stench was strongest in a final, spiteful hurrah before facing whoever stood on the other side of the door. 

He allowed himself one last bracing breath before he exited his workshop to find both Blaise and Pansy waiting for him. Blaise leaned against the opposite wall, ankles and arms crossed, looking bored and as if he had a thousand other places to be and a hundred other things to do. _Liar_.

Pansy, on the other hand, looked a split decision away from ripping Theo’s eyes from his sockets with her bare hands. Which was not ideal.

“Pans—” Theo began.

“Don’t you dare, Theodore Nott. You _lied_ to me.”

“I didn’t technically—”

“You _omitted_ you slithering Slytherin fuck.” Her bangs. They moved as she spoke, sharp jerks to the left and right, propelled by fury and french fashion and whatever the fuck made her black bob so gods damned glossy. Jostled bangs might as well be considered a sign of the apocalypse at this point. 

“Pans, crass language really doesn’t suit you—”

“I will _eviscerate you_. Draw and quarter you. That’s a historic form of execution performed on this property at one time, yes?”

Pansy truly, utterly, seethed. Theo tore his eyes from the tiny package of punishment in front of him to look over her head, seeking some kind of safety or sympathy from Blaise.

She stomped on his foot, sending a sharp bolt of pain up his leg.

“You two can make eyes at each other later. _We_ aren’t done discussing how badly you owe me,” Pansy snapped. “You are the worst friend, Theodore Nott. The absolute worst.”

“I know.”

Pansy’s bangs jostled again as she blinked at him, fury slipping into a different kind of anger, motivations shifting.

“No, you aren’t allowed to agree with me,” her brows furrowed, face scrunched in frustration. “You are going to help me, that’s my price.”

Theo didn’t miss the silent shaking of Blaise’s shoulders in the background as he suppressed his amusement. Theo pursed his lips, eyes narrowed as he considered the many consequences of being indebted to Pansy Parkinson.

“I negotiated with Goblins for you. And then you went and hung out with _my_ best friend when we were supposed to be giving her space—” Pansy stepped out of his personal bubble, raising and dropping her hands in an exasperated gesture. “And expressly against Draco’s wishes. Of course, I’m the idiot here, I actually believed he was serious about us having to stay away for a while. But then, you didn’t even so much as get a hex sent your way, did you?” 

Pansy-spiral incoming, Theo braced himself as her tone pitched higher, indignation flaring.

“Is it because you have a cock? Fucking _men_ ,” Pansy whirled. “Blaise Zabini if you don’t stop laughing at me I will hex you into next week _are we clear_?”

Blaise arched a brow at her, unfazed by the wand pointed at his chest. He lifted his hand, a single digit extended as he slowly directed the wand away from his person. 

“I’m sympathetic to your cause, Pansy,” he told her, amusement almost entirely transformed into sincerity. Theo really needed to learn how to do that. “And while the patriarchy is a problem, I do think this is more a case of misguided best intentions muddled by grief.” _Oh, he was good. He was very good._

Pansy made a thoughtful noise, apparently appeased before turning her wand on Theo.

“Draco’s birthday is in four days,” she announced.

Spiral turned whiplash, Theo found himself a little lost on how the two ideas connected. Theo honestly couldn’t decide if he was meant to agree or not. From behind Pansy, he saw Blaise nod.

“Pansy, you’re terrifying. You know that. I’m genuinely more afraid of you than I am of Draco. Whatever you want, I’ll do it,” Theo said. He wished he had the courage to move her wand in the way Blaise had. But he felt fairly certain it would be met with a hexing. He didn’t imagine Pansy would be quite as kind as Draco had been. 

Pansy didn’t break her angry stare, surveying him for any traces of falsehood before she finally pocketed her wand with a satisfied smile.

“Excellent, I’m glad we’re on the same page. Now, I’ll need you to rekey Draco’s wards and break me into their flat.”

Blaise laughed again. Pansy continued her reign of terror. And truth be told, Theo wouldn’t have her any other way.

—

**A day that is not a Friday, also Draco’s birthday: June 5th, 2007**

Considering that Theo had spent five years teaching himself the most effective ways to break through complicated and potentially deadly home defenses, rekeying Hermione and Draco’s wards was easy work. Even excluding the fact that Theo had helped build them in the first place. 

Theo’s particular skillset, narrow as it was, ran deep. Need a portkey with absolute precision and almost no dizziness? He could do it in his sleep. Need access through wards unchanged and unconquered for centuries? He could do it; he might just need a few years. Pansy had known exactly what she was doing by calling upon his talents. In fact, Theo wondered if she'd been planning this since he'd asked her to help him with the Goblin negotiations. 

And then she had to throw in a stipulation that he act as a distraction, getting Hermione out of the flat long enough for Pansy to break in and do whatever it was she had planned. Theo didn’t know, didn’t ask; he didn’t want any part in it. Plausible deniability and all that, the very same gift he’d tried to give Blaise. 

In payment for his additional services, in the never-ending circle of quid pro quo that existed between them, Theo took his time spending that afternoon with Granger. They caught up, they lounged in the gardens, Theo even did his very best to offer advice in an effort to save Draco from more pain. Draco finally seemed like he had hope, finally seemed like he could see light at the end of his tunnel, or a bed at the end of his sofa vigil, as it were.

Theo couldn’t stand the thought of Draco losing that hope again, of going back to the drinking and the occlusion and the agony of holding himself together day after day only to fall apart in the shadowed halls of the Nott Estate. He practically begged for her to be gentle, and he believed her when she said she would.

For a moment, it almost felt normal, easy like their friendship had been before she’d forgotten it all. That uncanny valley, so close to the real thing but still not quite, unsettled Theo’s stomach long after she’d gone. 

Theo paced the long halls of his family home, hating that he couldn’t think of a single thing to do besides take inventory of his many and varied smoke-damaged textiles and compiling a list for Pansy to try and sell. And when he finished his list, the only thing left to do was tinker with his portkeys, coming and going, enclosed and escaped, something like a coffin lowered halfway to its grave.

Seven _coming_ , Eight _going_. The thing with teeth watched. 

He’d told Hermione, just that very afternoon, that he was reformed, that he no longer dabbled in the very experiments he dabbled in on an almost daily basis. She’d hidden grotesquely illegal artifacts for him in her guest room, including an experimental time turner that absolutely would have earned him a cell in Azkaban. He’d tried to stop, he wanted to stop, and instead, he’d somehow been roped into distributing three illegal portkeys to an uncommonly grumpy goblin. 

She’d be disappointed in him if she remembered. She’d be furious. And he’d deserve it, too.

Theo sighed, flicking a key towards the thing with teeth: _coming._

He flicked another: _going_.

Again and again and again.

 _Coming, going, coming, going, coming, going, coming, going, coming, going, coming, going_ until—

A point for _going_. It was usually a point for going. And if Theo stopped to think about it, he probably planned it that way. 

But instead of _going_ , he pocketed the portkey and looked around his lab. It still looked as barren and defunct as the day he’d discovered it. Whatever fantasies he’d entertained about some kind of birthright to this place had evaporated with a labored breath, exhausted from breaking through ward after ward. 

He’d told her he was reformed.

What was that thing about bravery? It required impulsiveness? And was it even bravery if he did it out of guilt and shame?

Theo’s jaw tensed, lips thinning as they pulled against his teeth, barely parting for breath. He looked towards the thing with teeth, obscured in the shadows from which it taunted and sneered. Theo flushed, angry heat stampeding through his veins. He gave up by way of giving in.

Theo lit up every last dark corner in the lab, soaking the space in flames.

He didn’t give himself the chance to rethink his actions, to take back the impulse controlling the movements drawn by his wand and the incantation spoken by his mouth. He set the room aflame and walked away.

He recast the century’s old wards as he exited the workshop, smoke curling in the air around him. For once, the wards designed to keep something out would keep something in instead. 

And maybe it was just a small spark of bravery, a tiny, contained flame. But little fires tended to grow into bigger ones with enough time and fuel. Theo figured he had plenty of both.

—

**The Summer Solstice, sadly not a Friday, also Theo’s birthday: June 21st, 2007**

“Are you planning on ignoring your birthday like Draco now?”

Theo opened his eyes for a fraction of a second before slamming them shut again. Blaise had invited himself over at an hour Theo typically reserved for sleep. He made a dismissive noise, not unlike a growl and tried to sink into his pillow.

He heard Blaise chuckle from somewhere near the foot of the bed.

“I thought we could play some Quidditch,” Blaise said with a small tug at the blankets meant to convince Theo to rise.

Theo grumbled and rolled, taking an enormous swath of sheets and blankets with him in an attempt to block out all sense of sun, sound, and wakefulness. The bed shifted beside him and even from his buried place beneath the covers, Theo knew that Blaise had probably already won.

“I don’t particularly care for Quidditch,” Theo said, daring to peek out at him. Blaise sat with his back against the headboard, feet crossed at the ankles, looking far too refreshed for whatever Merlin forsaken hour it was. “I much prefer sleeping,” Theo concluded. 

“You have the audacity to be born on the longest day of the year, the most sunlight to celebrate with, and you try to waste it sleeping.”

Theo sighed and shoved the blankets away with as much affected agitation as he could manage in his barely-awake state. He regretted his drama immediately, the sharp shift in temperature chilled his bare chest despite the warm season. 

“Besides,” Blaise added, a slight pull at the corner of his eyes as he spoke. “Draco likes Quidditch. And so do I. So we’re going to go fly for a bit and then meet Pansy for lunch.”

Theo tried to gather the motivation to get up. Not even the desire for a shirt successfully moved him. He dragged a hand through his short hair, trying to assess exactly how sleep tousled it had become and whether he needed to bother with a shower before engaging in physical activity against his will. Blaise watched his every movement, waiting for his concession. 

“Pansy excluded, don’t the rest of you have jobs you need to be working? It’s what— not a Friday, that much I know. Thursday maybe?”

Blaise gave a small shake of his head as he finally stopped the assessment that burned a trail across Theo’s chest. Blaise rose from the bed and walked to the armoire, just fucking helping himself, clearly. He pulled out a shirt and tossed it in Theo’s direction.

“We took the day off for you,” he said. “Now get dressed, let’s go.” 

“You’re being rather short with me on my birthday,” Theo complained with a smirk. But he followed Blaise’s directions regardless, slipping the simple cotton shirt over his head. He barely had time to react as he pulled his head through the neckline: another article of clothing landed in his lap. Evidently he had to wear more than underwear on his birthday. Theo felt like he ought to at least have a say in that. 

“Would it help if I gave you your gift?”

“Absolutely,” Theo grinned.

Blaise slid the heavy drawer to the armoire shut, returning to the foot of the bed. Theo wondered, briefly, if Blaise had been joking about the gift as he stood there, simply watching as Theo shimmied into the rest of his clothes. But before he could ask, Blaise reached into his pocket, pulled something out, and tossed it to him.

“A key?” Theo asked, turning the ornate brass object over in his hands. It was a nice key, sure, but he had plenty. Too many, arguably.

“It’s to my house,” Blaise said, watching him with a slight tilt to his head.

Theo didn’t understand.

“But I can just apparate through your wards— unless you’re removing me from them? Which is definitely _not_ a very good birthday present.”

“It’s a portkey, too.”

Theo blinked, turning the key over again, intrigued. He stretched to his bedside table and picked up his wand, casting a spell on the small object.

“Huh,” he mused, examining the magic. “It’s not Ministry issued. Did you make it?”

Blaise gave a small shrug, “it won’t be as good as yours.”

“It—” Theo started, trying to make sense of the magic in front of him. “Where does it go? I’ve never seen destination magic like this before.”

“Wherever I am.”

“What?”

“It’ll take you to wherever I am.”

Something warm stretched inside Theo’s chest.

“That’s— complicated magic.”

“Been working on it for a while.”

“But— why?” Theo asked, failing to form into words whatever jumble had whirred to life behind his ribs. Only when the mask slid back into place did Theo realize Blaise had been unguarded, generous in his expressions. It wasn’t quite like when Draco occluded; there was no magic involved. Just caution, and a lifetime of practice, and presently, a little bit of hurt.

“In case you ever need it,” Blaise said, the muscles around his mouth just a bit too tight. “It was mostly meant to be symbolic. It’s fine if you don’t care for it, I realize you could probably make one with your eyes closed.”

“No, it’s not that. It’s just— thanks,” Theo concluded lamely, still sitting in the center of his bed, a touch sleep-addled, and not quite sure what the key in his hands was meant to be symbolic of.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> many additional thanks to icepower55 and EndlessMoonChild for putting up with me and my process xD
> 
> additionally, a huge thanks to YOU for reading! i truly hope you enjoyed it!! <3


	3. The Autumnal Equinox

**Finally a Friday: July 6th, 2007**

It took six months. Six months of disappointingly imbalanced or entirely cancelled Fridays before Draco and Hermione finally returned: social circle complete once more. When they stepped through the Floo, immediately accosted by Pansy, it was like the first half of the year had all been an unpleasant, off-kilter dream Theo endured in order to earn his equilibrium again. 

He’d missed the easy, playful banter they had as a group. He’d missed gambling with Pansy even though he always lost. He’d missed huffing at Blaise when he inevitably did something to disrespect the estate’s furniture. He’d missed learning whatever ridiculous muggle history Hermione decided to teach them when she’d had one drink too many. And he’d missed dueling, harmlessly drunk, with Draco just because they could. It was a much preferable state to the more harmful drunkenness he’d grown too familiar with in his off-balance start to the year.

Theo lay on the floor, skin simmering, as the cool pinpricks of Hermione’s magic blanketed the sunburn jinx Draco had just leveled him with. Theo laughed, staring at the ceiling. For the first time in a long time, he didn’t mind the dark shadows he saw there, even knowing the thing with teeth probably lurked, still seething over the conflagration in its usual hiding place. 

When Theo’s skin fully cooled, he lifted his head to find Blaise watching him from the nearby table. He leaned back so that only two legs of his chair were on the ground and he had his feet propped up on the table. Theo fought the urge to roll his eyes at the blatant challenge in Blaise’s posture; he’d already shoved Blaise’s feet off the table more than once that evening.

Hermione and Draco had vanished. Pansy too, it seemed.

Theo pushed himself off the floor and relocated to the chair next to Blaise. He almost reached out to knock Blaise’s ankles off the table. But at a certain point, why bother? 

“Where’d everyone go?” Theo asked, warm now only by way of the alcohol in his bloodstream.

“Granger and Draco are probably making out somewhere,” Blaise said with a small shrug. “Pansy said she needed the loo…”

“But she’s spying on them,” Theo finished, leaning against an arm on the table.

“Most likely.”

Blaise dropped his feet from the furniture of his own free will, rocking the two suspended legs of his chair towards the ground. He leaned forward, fingers connecting with Theo’s forearm, dragging across his skin with a series of quick, assessing movements. A different kind of burning trailed the path his fingers took. 

“Hermione took care of the sunburn alright?” Blaise asked, watching Theo with a hint of unmasked curiosity.

Theo nodded, realizing that though Blaise’s hand had stopped searching him for lingering sunburn, it hadn’t broken contact. 

“I can’t say I missed the dueling,” Blaise continued in an uncharacteristic offering of conversation, propelling it on his own and entirely without Theo’s prompting. Perhaps they’d both had more to drink than they realized.

Theo watched the way Blaise’s gaze dragged from his eyes down to where his fingers wound around Theo’s forearm as it rested against the table. In the absence of the sunburn jinx, Theo only knew of one other way to explain the new burning in his skin beneath Blaise’s touch. Something ached behind the wall of boundaries inside his chest.

The alcohol made him do it, he was sure of it. A little bit of blur, a little bit of bold. Theo twisted his arm under Blaise’s hand, shifting his palm from flat against the table to face up: open, offering. Tiny fires danced beneath the pads of Blaise’s fingers, as if he’d spoken that handy little spell they’d all learned as teenagers. Blaise finally moved his hand, trailing towards the inside of Theo’s wrist, then to the heel of his palm, then the length of his fingers, then— gone.

Blaise sighed, dropping his inflammatory hand towards the floor where it dangled in Theo’s periphery. Theo couldn’t stop staring at his own arm against the table, half expecting to see scorch marks burned into his skin.

“This isn’t it,” Blaise said in a quiet, disappointed voice.

Theo looked up at him, startled by how close they sat together. When had that happened? And when had Blaise learned to do that, whatever that was, with his hands? Theo tilted his head in question, a little further than intended, drinks loosening the muscles in his neck, uncoiling the serpent in his spine.

“Isn’t what?” he asked, searching Blaise’s face and finding no mask.

“Gods I wish it were,” Blaise said in a non-answer. “It could have been. But it’s not.”

Something dark, annoyed, flashed across Blaise’s face as he tensed. Theo’s brain swam in alcohol, but he did his best to surface, to find a shore to beach himself on just long enough to make sense of the nonsense in front of him.

“I think soon though,” Blaise said. It felt very much like a conclusion.

Theo watched as Blaise slid his chair away and leaned back, balancing again on two legs and looking pointedly at something in the other direction, avoiding Theo.

Even through the haze of his alcohol consumption, Theo felt his defenses failing. Years of careful brick laying, row after row, building a wall tall enough to keep the thing he knew could hurt him hidden behind a barrier inside his chest. It was the only thing keeping his off-limit thoughts _off-limits_. He’d done so well too, operating on one side of a sturdy brick wall that respected his friendship with Blaise, that held fast to necessary boundaries.

He’d spent years building that wall, fortifying it and forgetting it. Forgetting the things he hid behind it. And now— _fuck_. He’d just handed Blaise a sledgehammer to knock the whole thing down.

Thank Merlin for Pansy’s impeccable timing.

—

“Nott,” Pansy said as she reentered the room, blowing holes in Theo’s temporary theory that the entire room had been flipped upside down, because he certainly felt disorientated enough for that to be the case. “Our friends are defiling your ballroom with _romance_.”

Theo just looked at her, grateful to have someone else in the room to focus on. But he also had no idea what Pansy expected him to say to that. If Draco and Hermione wanted to have a little romance, they should. After the agony they’d both been through they certainly deserved it more than most. It felt normal to have them sneaking off like teenagers to be alone. So normal it panged of a jealousy Theo didn’t want to place.

“Good for them?” he asked.

“I thought so,” she said as Blaise stood.

“I should head out,” he said. Theo looked up at him, still seated. He could feel the confusion pulling at his brows. “Early meeting,” Blaise added, seeing the question.

“On a Saturday morning?” 

Pansy’s question came out more like an accusation as she slid into her chair across the table from them, her own look of suspicion falling across her face.

“Yes,” Blaise said. “Tell the lovebirds goodbye for me.” 

He glanced once at Theo, then at Pansy, before retreating to the Floo where he vanished in a flash of green before either of them could say another word. 

It took Theo a few seconds to process that sudden departure, stare still focused on the far side of the large entertaining room where Blaise had just vanished. When he could finally pull his gaze away, Theo found Pansy had crossed her arms and arched a brow. Even slightly inebriated, the command in her regal posture compelled him. He’d probably comply with damn near anything she asked. And he had a feeling, an exceptionally uncomfortable one, that questions were about to fly.

He stared at her.

She stared at him.

She tapped a nail against the table. Then, “what exactly did I just walk in on?”

“Nothing,” Theo said in an autonomic sort of defense. 

Pansy let out a short, sharp laugh.

“You were making eyes at each other again.”

“You know, you say that a lot, Pans. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

If he’d been asked to deny it just an hour before, Theo might have believed the very words he spoke. But now, with the rubble of a brick wall at his feet, the sentiment sounded stale even to his own ears. He couldn’t help but repeat her question to himself. What _had_ she just walked in on?

“You know exactly what I’m talking about, Theodore Nott. You two were about thirty seconds from undressing each other.”

For a Slytherin, Pansy could be a little heavy-handed for Theo’s liking.

“Pansy, I was _not_ looking at him like that— just because I’m a gay man with straight friends doesn’t mean I’m incapable of looking at them without being a complete lecher.”

Pansy made an exaggerated show of rolling her eyes and swiped an entire bottle of white wine from the center of the table. She flicked her wand and had it uncorked in seconds. Theo watched as her gaze landed on one of the several glasses available for use before evidently deciding against it. 

“Firstly, you absolute idiot, Blaise is not straight and the fact that I have to inform you of this is just— I don’t even know what to do with you. And secondly, we all saw how you used to look at Draco after his Quidditch practices.”

Theo reached for his own bottle of wine. This was set to be one of _those_ Pansy talks.

“Firstly,” he attempted to mock. “I would prefer you did not remind me of my sexual awakening as it relates to Draco. We’ve all been traumatized by it enough as it is. And secondly, you were fucking looking, too.” Theo thought about pouring himself a glass. Instead, he took a swig straight from the bottle.

“Don’t avoid the more important conversation here. Coward.” Pansy took her own indelicate swig from the bottle in her hand.

Theo frowned, “You’re mean. Why am I friends with you again?”

Pansy shrugged as if she could not give a singular fuck about the answer. Right, that’s why. She was a mean, evil queen, and he had a very complicated relationship with his love of her for it. Also, she’d probably murder someone for him if he asked. Which was a handy kind of friend to keep around.

Theo watched as Pansy leaned forward and plucked an olive spear from the center of the table. Deliberately, she pulled a single olive free, held it between two fingers, and then flicked it at his head.

Theo had far too much alcohol in his system to successfully dodge projectiles at this point in the evening. She had good aim; it hit him squarely on the forehead.

“Are you telling me you genuinely believe that Blaise Zabini is a straight man who wasn’t considering what you might look like naked a few minutes ago?”

“He dated Daphne for almost three years,” Theo said.

“He casually fucked her for barely two.”

“She’s a woman.”

“Your point?”

Theo supposed he didn’t have one. Not a good one at least. But Blaise had never given Theo any sort of indication he was interested in men, at least until whatever it was Pansy had walked in on. Theo suspected at a certain point in a friendship— and around the fifteen year mark could probably act as a standard— there were certain things you should just know about each other.

“Blaise would have said something to me— if he—” It was hard to make excuses when he didn’t have any. Theo could feel his carefully contained feelings spilling from behind his broken brick wall. 

Pansy just shrugged again, far too Blaise-like for her own good. “Maybe he had a good reason for not saying anything. Maybe he didn’t want to make you jealous,” she pondered as she took another gulp of wine. Her bangs shifted slightly, alcohol clearly affecting her more than her highness let on.

“Make me jealous?” Theo barked a sharp laugh. “That ship sailed in sixth year when I walked in on him and Daphne—“

“See. You were jealous,” Pansy said, a smug fucking smirk twisting at her lips. 

“There was no point, Pans. He was with a girl and I—” built a brick wall to sequester the things he wasn’t allowed to feel.

 _Oh fuck_. 

—

**No longer a Friday: July 7th, 2007**

Theo still wandered the cavernous halls of his manor long after Friday became not Friday anymore. Long past the time when the clocks ticked over to a new day, when he thought of time as counting up and not counting down, when the first filtering of early morning light breaking through the dark halls of his home wouldn’t be all that surprising a sight. Pansy had long gone. Draco and Hermione even longer than that. Theo half-wondered if Blaise might return, but he couldn’t quite explain that thought, even to himself. Blaise had no reason to return, apart from the potential to save Theo from his hangover. Apparently Blaise had an early morning meeting to attend. Not that Theo believed _that_ for a single second.

Theo carried his bottle of wine with him as he wandered throughout his home, finding himself in the library somewhere between not-exactly-the-middle-of-the-night and not-quite-early-morning-either. He rarely used his library. Most of his attempts at leisurely reading ended up interrupted by well-meaning friends paying him unexpected visits. He really didn’t know what to do with all his books. They just sat there, mostly rotting and collecting dust.

Smoke damage by the name of Blaise Zabini would probably get to them one day. Theo had a feeling that such a thing would greatly displease Hermione, regardless of what she could or could not remember. 

Theo let the bottle slip from his hand, landing with a thud on a large reading table. He wobbled as the bottle did, trying to prevent it from tipping. Theo sighed, looking up at all the shelves lined with books he had no use for. He began summoning anything medical— anything Draco had made use of in the past six months— and created a series of stacks on one side of the room. That would be the Draco pile.

He summoned anything related to divination just to annoy Blaise, knowing that despite having a touch of Sight the man _hated_ the study of the stuff. Experiencing Blaise’s rants about Trelawney’s class had been a thing of beauty. To this day, it was a guaranteed way to break Blaise out of his stoic mask.

Theo made piles of books about art, architecture, and fashion history for Pansy. Anything related to Quidditch he split between the Draco and the Blaise stacks. He sent potions texts to Draco and Herbology to Blaise. Nearly everything else: charms, transfiguration, history, magical creatures, politics, and so much more, he set aside for Hermione. 

And when the towers of books stood taller than Theo, an impressive feat to be sure, and multiplied to such density that the library floor had become a maze to navigate, Theo finally stopped and realized he could not find his wine. In a way, the books felt like bricks, walling him in and keeping him safe. 

His head spun in his self-made maze. If he looked up, he could still see the tall shelves around him, now partly dotted with books he’d yet to pull and categorize. And if he was honest with himself, he’d lost track of which stacks were which and to whom they were all meant to belong. 

He’d run out of thinking, out of things to occupy himself with that weren’t those he’d been avoiding. He caught sight of the thing with teeth, sneering, lingering around the corner in Theo’s new maze with all its shadows.

Of course. Of _fucking_ course. 

“Like what I’ve done with the place?” Theo asked.

He took a single large step towards his demon. He glanced at the opening between stacks to his right, hoping to catch sight of the table and his wine. Theo snorted when the thing with teeth said nothing.

“No comment? That’s fine, I expect about as much from you as you do of me.”

Theo turned at a stack of books on house elves, from their magic to their history to their genealogy among the Sacred Twenty-Eight families. Definitely a stack meant for Granger.

He came face to face with the thing with teeth. Even in the dark, he saw the whites.

“Mad I burned down the workshop?” Theo’s lip curled, his own teeth on display in a cruel sneer. He might have been sufficiently drunk enough to have lost himself in a literal literary maze of his own making, but he still had enough venom in his fangs to spit at the thing in front of him. “Or did you see? Tonight? Were you watching then, too?”

Theo laughed, something hollow in his chest. He pushed past— through— the thing with teeth, not that it was _really_ there to begin with. It couldn’t touch him; he couldn’t touch it.

Theo shivered. 

“Did you know?” Theo asked, continuing his navigation between stacks of books. “I never told you. I don’t think you paid enough attention to see. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Just another disappointment.”

Theo stopped, forcing a deep breath in through his mouth and out through his nose, trying to reign in a rapidly rising heart rate, a fluttering shame in his stomach. 

“But you know what?” Theo said, fed up with the book bricks around him. “I think I’ll say it to you anyway, just so it’s been said.” He reached out and pushed at a stack of books in front of him. He didn’t want to be lost in his own home, not anymore.

“Last of the Nott line,” he said, flinching as the books in front of him tumbled, taking several nearby stacks with them. A cascade of toppling books like bricks. “And I’ve been pretending I’m not a little bit in love with one of my best friends for years.” Theo felt like he should laugh at that but he didn’t find it funny, not at all. Not even enough to warrant a hollow, self-deprecating laugh that acknowledged his own absurdity. No. Theo mostly found he very much wished he didn’t have to face it at all. 

The thing with teeth didn’t respond. Theo didn’t even know if it was still in the library at all. But he hadn’t expected a response either way. He never did. 

Maybe he should have yelled, shouted at the top of his lungs how much he hated it. How Theo wished it would leave him alone. Stay in the shadows, or better yet, stay away altogether. He hated being haunted and it felt like such a petulant thought to have, but it was exhausting: feeling it, hating it, being judged by it.

Theo launched himself at another enormous stack of books, shoving it with both hands. He spun, sending the next nearest stack toppling. He kicked at another tower, breath heaving as his sinuses stung, so close to crying but he would not, could not, allow it. Not now, not over that thing. Never over _it._ And not over the things he’d tried not to feel for so long, either.

Surrounded by a sea of fallen books, Theo spotted the table and his bottle of wine. With unstable ankles wobbling from wine and a lack of general athleticism, Theo stumbled over the book rubble, probably breaking bindings and cracking spines in the process. He stopped at the table, bracing for stability, finally feeling an exhaustion that should have taken him hours before.

Theo hauled himself on top of the table, laid his head against the wood, and slept. 

—

**Another Friday: July 13th, 2007**

The following Friday felt disruptively normal. Deceptively so. So normal that Theo nearly worked himself into a fit trying to figure out why it felt so mundane and why nothing cosmic or cataclysmic or otherwise catastrophic had made its presence known. Theo felt like a fucking mess as he curated the evening’s food and drink selection in preparation of his friends’ arrivals, and he needed something to explain _why_ he felt like that.

A flash of green. 

Without looking, Theo would have bet money— against Pansy, no less— that Blaise had just entered the room. He didn’t need a touch of Sight to recognize the shift in the air around him whenever Blaise was around. It was part of the reason he’d built that damned brick wall. 

“It seems you’ll be getting a cat,” Blaise said in greeting.

Theo didn’t turn around, still arranging several platters of snacks on the table. He found he enjoyed doing it himself, no matter how much the elves might protest. It also gave him another small moment to ready himself after not having seen Blaise since the Friday before: an unusual amount of time and distance. 

Such divergence caused Theo’s mind to wander. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone more than a couple of days without seeing Blaise. And suddenly, on the heels of something that had felt transformative, Blaise apparently had more work than he could handle between the family wineries and his business with Draco. 

Theo flexed his fingers, closing them into a loose fist as he tried to channel the nervous energy surging with every beat of his heart. 

“A cat?” 

He turned to find Blaise leaning against the opposite wall: watching. Though perhaps it ought to be called staring, or analyzing, or ruthlessly assessing with an unrepentant stare that said _I see everything_. 

Theo wasn’t ready to be seen, not like that. 

“A cat,” Blaise confirmed. 

“You’re just— Seeing visions of me with a cat?”

Blaise pushed off the wall, joining Theo at the table covered in its spread of food and drink.

“There was a crystal ball,” he said with a shrug. “I happened to look. You had a cat.”

Theo tried to respond but found his words caught in his throat, false starts as he tried to speak. His mouth had dropped open.

Finally, “what were you doing with a crystal ball?”

“Gazing.”

Either Theo just experienced a minor disconnect from reality or Blaise Zabini just winked at him on the tail end of an infuriating non-answer. Theo saw it for the utterly transparent attempt at normalcy it was. As if Blaise wasn’t avoiding the very conversation Theo had been expecting.

“You hate divination,” Theo said.

“I do.”

Theo very seriously considered shaking Blaise by the shoulders. His intentional opaqueness made Theo want to shout. He needed more than two syllables to work with in order to have a proper conversation, and Blaise just didn’t seem interested in giving. 

“So then what the _fuck_ were you doing looking into a crystal ball?”

Blaise shrugged again and Theo nearly snapped.

“I get impatient.”

Five whole syllables. Theo counted them on his fingers. He probably ought to count his blessings. 

“What—” Theo had to stop, adrenaline breaching levees and flooding from his heart. This was _not_ the conversation they were meant to be having and Blaise was _not_ supposed to look so smug and Theo’s pulse was _not_ supposed to be pounding this hard inside his chest. “What does that even mean, _you get impatient_?”

“Please don’t be mad.” Blaise looked at him like there was something amusing about his response, like being frustrated about never getting a straight answer was an unreasonable state of being.

Theo had spent a week. And entire week working himself up to whatever this Friday was supposed to look like. They’d had a _moment_ , protective walls utterly obliterated, and now Blaise seemed like he’d strengthened his own, dug a fucking moat around it with archers at the ready. 

“I don’t _want_ to be mad at you but you’re making it really difficult, Zabini.”

“By telling you something I’ve Seen?”

“Yes, exactly,” Theo said. He couldn’t bear the proximity any longer, just standing at the end of a table, too close to be strangers but not close enough for where he’d originally thought— hoped— their conversation might go. Theo found a nearby sofa and threw himself on it, laying back and heaving a great sigh. It felt liberating to extricate himself from whatever siren aura Blaise seemed to have about him. 

“I don’t remember the last time you told me something you Saw.”

It didn’t sound like Blaise had moved from his place by the table and Theo didn’t have the courage to look over to see his face. Instead, Theo sought out the corners of the room, growing darker as evening approached. Soon, they may very well be occupied by something foul.

“I don’t See much, you know that.”

“And you don’t share what matters when you do.”

“I’m sharing what I can.”

“I don’t want to hear about cats, Blaise. I don’t want to talk about whatever distraction this is supposed to be. I don’t—” Theo didn’t know how to finish that sentence. He wasn’t sure he even knew what he did or didn’t want, apart from a way out of this conversation. 

He heard Blaise moving behind him, the sound of a drink being poured, and suddenly, a glass being held over Theo’s right shoulder for him to take. Theo almost smiled despite his annoyance. He reached up and took the drink, a classic Blaise Zabini peace offering if there ever was one.

“I think I’m going to go,” Blaise said.

Theo twisted, nearly forgetting about his fresh drink, amber liquid sloshing in the glass at Theo’s jerky movement. 

“What? You just got here.”

Blaise wore his mask but it had developed cracks: tiny fissures spiderwebbing across what had once been such an impenetrable surface. Blaise didn’t answer, so Theo tried again.

“Why?”

“This isn’t it. It’s getting harder.”

“You said that last week.”

Another tiny crack. Blaise’s eyes widened just long enough that Theo registered his surprise.

“Do you remember much of last week?”

“Enough.”

“Well—” Blaise started, breaking off with uncertainty in a manner so unlike Blaise that Theo felt his stomach drop. Something about the action felt like a harbinger of bad news, sowing dread in Theo’s gut. “It wasn’t it. It still isn’t. And I told you, I’m getting impatient.”

Theo ran through several different ways to respond to that. Part of him wanted to beg Blaise to let him in, to explain whatever it was that he kept so frustratingly close to the surface yet still out of reach. Another part of him wanted to give into his frustration, to snap. If Blaise didn’t want to explain then he had no obligation to do so, but Theo had no obligation to be tormented by it either. The shadows did enough tormenting, he didn’t need it from Blaise too. 

Ultimately, it was the part of himself he’d kept locked up for so long that spoke, the part that had a taste of freedom, of candor, and wanted more.

“I wish you’d stay.” Theo tapped a finger against the side of his glass, eyes seeking the corners of the room once again.

He didn’t. And it left Theo to wonder how, over the course of just a few minutes, he felt like so much had happened when really nothing had at all. 

—

**Feels like a normal Friday: August 10th, 2007**

Blaise Zabini was a coward. Also an idiot. And several other unflattering names running in a rotation through Theo’s mind during the vast majority of his waking hours and a decent number of his unconscious ones as well. In what had been nearly a month since Blaise tried to use Theo’s want of a cat as a distraction technique to avoid having any kind of _real_ conversation, Theo could count the number of times he’d managed to get Blaise alone long enough to speak with him. That number was a resounding and damning zero. In fact, apart from a perfunctory attendance at their Friday night gatherings, Blaise had made himself exceedingly scarce. 

Theo felt fairly confident Blaise bought a new vineyard purely for the purposes of avoiding him.

“I need a fucking assist,” Theo said as he levitated a few jars of potions ingredients towards Draco. “I think I might kill Blaise.”

Draco made a noise but didn’t answer. Instead, he held up a pot of Hellebore in question.

“Take that one, too,” Theo said. “I think I have two more out here somewhere, I could send the other to Hogwarts. Bet Longbottom would love that.”

“Care to explain why we’re clearing out your greenhouses?”

“Are you complaining about getting free supplies for your shop?”

Draco arched a brow at him, lack of amusement evident in the way his very posture seemed to sigh. He did not answer.

“You know I hated Herbology,” Theo said, relenting to the command for more details in Draco’s demeanor. “And I don’t need all this. It’s too difficult to maintain, so I’d rather you have it for your shop. And Hogwarts can get some use out of it, too.”

“Just let the elves maintain it. You don’t have to do anything,” Draco said, watching him with suspicion pulling his brows together, poking holes in Theo’s flimsy excuse-making.

“I, well—” Theo resumed sorting the herbs in front of him. “I sent the elves to help with Blaise’s new vineyard.” He rolled a jar of dried fluxweed along the grain of the wooden workbench in front of him. “Barely even thanked me too, git.”

“The last two elves? You’re alone here?” The sharpness in Draco’s voice surprised Theo, forcing him to look up. 

“Well I’m never really alone,” Theo said, feeling the joke in his tone bleeding through. “There’s always the thing in the shadows.”

Draco rolled his eyes, head shaking. “This is a big estate to be alone in.”

“I have friends,” Theo said, feeling the indignant edge in his tone. “They spend a lot of time here. Except Blaise these days, which is the problem. He’s avoiding me and it may drive me to murder.”

“Seems a bit dramatic.”

Theo snorted and lifted a hand, gesturing to himself.

Draco cracked a smile, “point taken. I haven’t seen much of Blaise either, and we technically own a shop together. If that helps.”

“It does not help,” Theo said. “That just means he’s being a shitty friend to more than one of us.”

“It _is_ possible he’s actually busy,” Draco said with a shrug, dropping a few jars of fungi into the box in front of him.

“Doubtful.”

“Not all of us have bottomless vaults and enormous estates these days, Nott.” Draco didn’t sneer when he said it; his face remained remarkably level. But there was a warning there, too.

“Not anymore, _Malfoy_.”

“You’re being a prick.”

“Yeah, a bit. Besides, Blaise _does_ have near bottomless vaults. And if he’d quit buying wineries on the continent he could afford an estate, too.” 

Draco held up one of the jars, “if I didn’t need these supplies I’d be throwing one of these at your head.”

“Noted.” It might have been a threat, but Theo smiled. At least one of his friendships still operated under normal parameters. “Has Blaise said anything to you about Seeing something recently?” 

Draco set the jar down, brows drawn together. He had a look of something like wonder on his face, clouded by a question.

“Blaise never says anything to me about his Sight.”

“Nothing?”

“No, nothing,” Draco’s face shifted: a tiny quirk of his brow, a small smirk pulling at the corner of his mouth. “Does he tell _you_ things he Sees?”

“Not often. And only ever small things. Something about a cat most recently.”

Draco’s smirk grew. Theo considered throwing his own jar of potions supplies at his friend’s head.

“I wonder if he’s Seen your plans to murder him,” Draco mused. Theo’s grip on the small jar in his hand tightened, prepared to soar.

“Now you’re being the prick.”

Draco sighed.

“He’s been off recently. I’ve noticed too,” Draco conceded. “He might just need some space. He can’t be at your beck and call all the time.”

 _Ouch._ Theo nearly staggered back. Draco could really cut to the core when he wanted.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“He’s here a lot. Does a lot for you— for me too,” Draco raised his hands in an attempt at defense. “He might need a break. It’s been— a hard year.”

Theo glared, his desire to launch an object at Draco’s head reaching critical levels. But the sincerity in Draco’s tone said he hadn’t meant it as an insult, that he’d only meant it as the reminder Theo probably needed.

“He’s never told me what he Sees, but he’s told me other things,” Draco admitted, looking at Theo like he meant to ask a question with his words.

“What things?”

“About you—”

“No— don’t.” Theo’s heart leapt to his throat. “He said soon.”

“That’s why you’re annoyed with him?”

“If I were just annoyed with him I wouldn’t be considering murder. I’m livid. He’s avoiding me.”

Draco laughed. “I guess we’ll just wait together, then.”

While Theo hadn’t intended on actually planning Blaise’s demise, he’d at least hoped for a little conspiracy with Draco. Patient, understanding Draco was a bit too mature for Theo’s liking. 

Draco held up another pot, sneezewort this time. 

“Yeah, take that too,” Theo said, lacking any other real response.

—

**Not a Friday: September 16th, 2007**

Theo had been attempting, and failing, to make himself lunch, something more complicated than a sandwich, when the sound of footsteps echoing through the halls of his home alerted him to someone’s presence. With most of his tapestries long since sold, sounds tended to bounce and rattle off the stone walls with abandon, nearly as effective an alert system as his elves had been.

Theo cancelled his cooking charms and turned to the entrance of his kitchens in time to see Blaise walk in.

Theo didn’t say anything, wasn’t quite sure how. Nearly two months had passed since Blaise had made the unilateral decision to make his presence scarce. And despite most of a lifetime of friendship, Theo couldn’t help but feel like a stranger had just invited himself over. Blaise wore lightweight trousers, probably custom and tailored to an obscene level of perfection. He had his shirt unbuttoned nearly halfway down his chest and sleeves rolled to his elbows. He looked so fucking casual and Mediterranean, like he’d just stepped out of a vineyard; Theo couldn’t help but hate him, just a bit, for looking so at ease. 

“Where are the elves?” Blaise asked. Whatever cracks might have lived on the surface of his mask had been repaired in the two months since Theo really had a chance to look at them. Theo took a slow breath in through his nose, resenting the collected perfection in front of him. He took a swing.

“At your wineries.”

_Crack._

Theo was sure he didn’t imagine the almost-flinch, the tiny new fissure forming.

“All of them?” Blaise took a deep breath of his own. “If I’d known—”

“You didn’t ask.” Another swing.

 _Crack_.

“I’ll send some back. Mopsy? Milly?”

“Don’t.”

“Why not?”

“Why are you here Blaise? You know there’s no one else here, right? No buffers.” 

_Crack_. 

Blaise’s lips thinned, as close to a grimace as Theo had ever seen. If anything, the new cracks in his mask only made Blaise more determined to hold them together. 

“Draco’s doing a birthday thing for Granger.” He pulled a jewelry box from his pocket and tossed it towards him. Theo missed the catch and chased the velvet box across the counter. He shot an annoyed look in Blaise’s direction; there was no way he’d actually expected Theo to catch that. “Can you make it a portkey? Same winery as two years ago. I need a duplicate too, just a key. In case they don’t use the ring.”

Theo sighed, popping open the jewelry box, unsurprised by the ruby ring inside. He missed seeing Hermione’s ring. There was something comforting about seeing a Nott family heirloom put to such good use, representing something so lovely. In a different world, it could have easily been worn by some woman he’d been forced to marry. Gifted to a pureblood stranger meant to bear him an heir to continue his now doomed line, destined for misery in a world that didn’t grant permission for a union like Hermione and Draco’s to exist. Hermione would have to work up the courage to ask Draco to see the ring eventually. 

“Probably shouldn’t have burned the workshop,” Theo muttered, mostly to himself. 

“You burned your workshop?”

“I don’t need it to make a portkey. Don’t worry.”

But Blaise certainly seemed worried. He took a small step forward, another small crack forming in his mask as the muscles along his jaw tensed. Theo watched him swallow.

“Why did you burn your workshop? You spent years trying to get in.” Blaise looked at him like Theo was the stranger.

“Emotional catharsis, mostly,” Theo said. He forced a shrug to say he didn’t care, that it hadn’t been an impulse he sometimes regretted in the middle of the night when he had nowhere to go and nothing to do when the nightmares and the thing with teeth kept him awake. 

“Demons again?” Blaise asked.

“Just the one.”

Blaise apparently didn’t know what to say to that. He just stood there, a single step closer to Theo than he’d been when he first entered the room, stuck in some version of _them_ where they didn’t know how to be around each other anymore. 

“Can I pick it up tomorrow?” Blaise asked.

Theo snapped the lid shut. He turned and pulled a tumbler from the cabinet behind him and tossed it to Blaise, who he fully expected _would_ catch it. 

“Grab a drink and have a seat,” Theo said. “I’ll have them done in twenty minutes.”

—

**Disappointingly not a Friday: September 19th, 2007**

Theo almost didn’t go. He turned Hermione’s ring into a portkey and handed it off to Blaise with barely another word spoken between them. Blaise said something about witnessing their hard work if Theo wanted to come and then exited the kitchen without a second glance back. Theo spent the rest of the afternoon hungry and annoyed, ability to prepare a substantial meal for himself thwarted by an emotional upheaval named Blaise Zabini. 

But then Pansy Parkinson sauntered into his greenhouses the afternoon of Hermione’s birthday, her face alight with derision and a healthy dose of annoyance. Typical, perfect Pansy. 

“Where the fuck are your elves, Nott? I’ve been wandering around for fifteen minutes just looking for you. Like a commoner.”

Theo snorted at her greeting and set aside the collection of herbs he’d been sorting. She didn’t allow him the chance to respond.

“What are you doing to your greenhouses? Where is everything?” Theo watched her ruthless assessment with fascination as her gaze tracked from sealed boxes to uprooted plants to jars pending sorting.

“I don’t need them,” Theo said. “I’m giving most of the supplies to Draco’s shop. Sending some other stuff to Hogwarts.”

Pansy narrowed her eyes at him, an intentional action, he knew, meant to convey that she was suspicious and she wanted him to know as much. 

“Well,” she said, seemingly a conclusion to her assessment. “I don’t have time for whatever—” a wave of her hand, “— _this_ is. I’ve come to collect you. We’re going to Italy.”

“A little short notice for international travel, don’t you think Pans?”

“Blaise told you two days ago. Do you have a portkey ready or am I going to have to wait while you make one?”

Theo had two options. He could push a few more of Pansy’s buttons, needle her for fun before admitting he didn’t have any spare portkeys directly to the Italian winery in question. Or, he could just start working on the portkey to save himself her ire. Either way, it was really only one option at the end of it; he was going to Italy. 

When they landed together inside the main building to the winery, Pansy did something she rarely did; she offered a genuine compliment.

“Inside a building, barely dizzy, _and_ we avoided the furniture,” she smiled at Theo. “The Ministry doesn’t know what it’s missing.” She gave him a fond pat on the arm and a wide smile; she gave just enough to keep the nobles in her court happy.

“The furniture thing was luck,” Theo admitted. “Mostly just hoped none of it had been moved since the last time.”

“Good, you’re here.”

Theo turned to find Blaise expertly carrying three wine glasses in one hand, dangling by their stems between his fingers, and a bottle of red in the other.

“This way,” Blaise said. “We’re going to have a great view.”

Pansy barely controlled her glee as she followed Blaise, tugging at Theo’s arm and forcing him to follow. Without that impetus, Theo wasn’t sure he’d have been capable of powering his own locomotion, immobilized by having seen Blaise and still not knowing what to say to him.

They stopped in front of an enormous bay of windows overlooking the vineyard on the hill below. Blaise had three chairs positioned in front of the windows: one for each of them, as if Theo’s presence had always been expected, predestined. And maybe it had. Blaise offered them each a glass of wine and sat in the leftmost chair. Before Theo even had the chance to claim the chair on the right, to create some space for himself, Pansy sank into it with a smirk. Only by virtue of her earlier compliment giving did Theo resist dethroning her. 

Pansy took a sip of her wine, crossing her legs and offering him a command in her stare that he roughly translated to: _sit, you coward._

He sat, arching a brow and thinking fondly of guillotines: an excellent muggle invention Hermione once taught him about.

“Right on time,” Blaise said, pulling Theo from his thoughts of regicide. On the hill below, two figures appeared between the trellised vines. Pansy leaned forward in her chair, rapt.

“They used the ring,” Theo said, a smile stretching across his face.

“How do you know?” Blaise asked.

Theo turned to look at Blaise, feeling something normal, simple, easy in the interaction.

“I never activated the key,” he said with a shrug. “Hopefully she picked the ring by choice and not because it was the only way to get here.” Theo didn’t bother hiding his smirk, he felt reasonably proud of himself.

Pansy laughed and clinked her glass with Theo’s in toast.

“They seem happy,” Blaise said, breaking eye contact with Theo and watching their friends below. They meandered and held hands and generally engaged in _touch_ in a way that seemed an impossible destination months before. 

“They’re honestly disgusting when they get like that,” Pansy said.

“I don’t know,” Theo said, pausing to take a sip of his wine as Draco and Hermione took their place at a table set up at the end of a row. “It’s kind of nice to know something like that is possible.”

Pansy snorted into her pinot. 

“I wasn’t consulted for any fashion choices in preparation of this date they’re having,” she said, eyes narrowed as she watched them through the window.

“Expecting they’ll need your services?” Blaise asked.

“Granger can’t pick lingerie to save her life.”

“She can do a lot of other things to save it though,” Theo said. 

“Don’t defend her. I’m extremely offended.”

“Well Pans, next time I plan on getting laid, I’ll let you pick my outfit.” Theo meant it as a playful joke but felt his stomach drop when Pansy shifted her focus from him to Blaise.

“I’ll hold you to that, Nott,” she said, still looking at Blaise. “Don’t make me wait too long.”

Guillotines were too good for that woman. 

—

**The Autumnal Equinox, not a Friday: September 23rd, 2007**

Several days later, Blaise invited himself over for the first time since July, outside of the portkey request for Draco.

“Can I help you?” Theo asked as Blaise brushed soot from his robes. A beat passed. But Blaise kept sweeping at his trousers long after the ash had gone. Finally, he straightened, acknowledging Theo with tentative eye contact.

“Don’t be upset.”

“Excellent opener, I’m feeling at ease already.”

Theo snapped his book shut and tossed it on the table. His friends seemed determined to keep him from any higher literary pursuits, always showing up at inconvenient times. He leaned forward in his armchair, brows lifted, waiting for whatever would upset him.

“I really think you should get a cat.”

Theo blinked. Surely— he couldn’t be serious.

“Is that a joke? Have I used a time turner? Are we just going to have a repeat of the last time you walked in here, told me to get a cat, and then _left_?” Theo’s anger caught him off guard, suddenly pounding behind his ribs and contorting his face. The leaving wasn’t even the biggest problem, Theo realized. The problem was that Blaise didn’t come back. He stayed away, two months of distance because of some arbitrary line in the sand drawn and Seen by only one of them. 

Blaise had the good graces to let a small recoil slip through the cracks in his mask.

“Perhaps you should borrow Crookshanks. See what it’s like to have a cat around here.”

“We’re not gambling with Pansy, no need to double down,” Theo snapped. He stood, feeling the sneer twisting at his lips as he walked to Blaise. Theo had found his limit and he did not appreciate being pushed over it. 

“Maybe next month,” Blaise continued as Theo stopped in front of him, barely enough space to cram Theo’s temper between them. “You could bring Crookshanks here, test the waters.”

As good as the anger felt in that spark of a moment, Theo felt the hardness around his eyes melting; he’d never been much for fury. That was Pansy’s department, sometimes Draco’s. But Theo’s fuse, when lit, flashed and died in a single great bang. Looking at Blaise, up close for the first time in so long, Theo realized he looked different. His typical confidence, painted on a fine mask of disinterest, had vanished. Instead, it looked like the facsimile it probably always had been, revealed by a series of cracks Theo bore some ownership of.

“Blaise, I don’t want to talk about cats.”

“Just something to think about,” he said, an attempt at his usual nonchalance.

Theo took a deep breath before he spoke, trying to find balance. Part of him wanted to joke about the ridiculousness of it all, plan a Crookshanks kidnapping, and accept the easy conversation being offered to him. But another part, a starving one, couldn’t take it anymore. He flexed a hand at his side, fingers curled and digging painfully into his palm as he gathered what little resolve he had for hard conversations. 

“You said you can’t change the things you’ve Seen.”

“I can’t.”

“Then what the _fuck_ are you trying so hard to control? And why don’t I get any say in it? You might have a touch of Sight but you don’t know everything.”

Blaise shifted away from him, a small transfer of weight from one foot to another, gaining a minuscule amount of breathing room.

“It’s soon. I’m almost positive.”

“That’s not good enough,” Theo said, taking up the space Blaise had just created. Theo thought for a moment he might understand what Draco meant when he said something in his chest wanted to get out, get to Granger. Because something inside Theo made itself known, trying to claw its way out of a cage made of flesh and bone. “What if I don’t want to wait for soon?” Theo demanded. “What if I want it now?” 

He felt breathless from having nearly said it, like he’d just declared war with his words, speaking the unspeakable thing that could never be retracted.

And Blaise looked about ready to give in, mask shattered in a way not dissimilar from the busts that once decorated the halls of Theo’s home. Blaise’s jaw tensed, resolve winding its way through the muscles, becoming words.

“I can’t risk it,” he said, the force of his eye contact almost painful. Theo refused to give, not after throwing himself into the crossfire of a conversation he didn’t want to have to begin with. He’d had enough. This was happening whether Blaise liked it or not.

“What _is_ it?” Theo asked in challenge.

“You know.” 

“I wonder. It’s not the same and you won’t tell me.”

Blaise pressed his lips together, literally smothering any kind of response he might have had. Theo wanted to throw something, fence with busts, ruin textiles, burn it all down. Of all things, Hermione Granger popped into his head in that moment.

He grit his teeth, squared his shoulders, and prepared himself to tell the thing getting in his way to _fuck off, thank you very much_. 

“You know,” he said, calm despite the painful thudding inside his chest. “I think I’ve fancied myself half in love with you most of my life. But you make it very difficult when you insist on being a stranger.” 

He allowed himself two seconds of eye contact, two seconds to gauge the impact of his words, two seconds for the portkey in his pocket to activate and whip him away.

A point for _going_.

And a point for finally saying it, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as always, MANY thanks to icepower55 and EndlessMoonChild for being the absolute best and helping to whip this story into shape while tolerating the madness that is my process. 
> 
> and thank YOU so much for reading!!!


	4. The Winter Solstice

**The best-worst not Friday: October 28th, 2007**

Turns out Theo was a bit of a coward, too. Probably somewhat of an idiot. But unlike Blaise, when Theo left him standing in the parlor after effectively baring his fucking soul, Theo did eventually come back. He just waited several hours: enough time that he felt confident Blaise wouldn’t be there any longer.

He wasn’t.

And thus began a month of avoidance, uncertainty, and general anxiety Theo would have rather done without. He drove himself mad: up the walls, over them, tearing them down. Night after night, he wondered at how irretrievably idiotic his confession had been, fiddling with portkeys and trying to figure out where he could even go, if he went. 

Draco and Hermione had descended into what each of them insisted definitely wasn’t-a-fight and had stopped showing up to Friday nights. Though, that was fine by Theo since he’d recently discovered he didn’t have the courage to entertain. He wasn’t sure he had it in him to face Blaise and whatever _soon_ , _not yet_ , or _never_ would eventually come from the conversation they couldn’t avoid forever, as much as Theo might wish that were the case. One doesn’t just admit to half a lifetime of repressed pining only to return to casual conversations about wine and Quidditch. 

The most frustrating part of trying to work up the courage to face the aftermath of his impulsivity was Theo’s inability to forget Blaise’s near begging about getting a cat. Theo couldn’t decide if what had looked almost like distress peeking out from beneath the cracks of Blaise’s mask had been solely a result of their conversation, or if there had been truth, genuine need, in the request.

The more he thought on it— obsessed, really— the more Theo couldn’t shake the sense that the cat, as ridiculous and obvious an attempt at distraction as it had been, had also been a real plea. On a morning near the end of the month, quite unfortunately not a Friday, a letter delivered by owl with his copy of the Daily Prophet sealed Theo’s suspicions.

_You should try borrowing Crookshanks._

No signature, no return address. Unneeded, obviously. Unnerving, more than that.

Later in the day, that sense of unease twisted like a knife in his chest when Theo received an owl from Granger wanting to meet. He’d never really put much stock in Blaise’s Sight. By Blaise’s own admission he didn’t See much or often, but the pieces lined up a little too neatly on that day, imperfect edges coming together in a perfect seam. 

And as much as he hated to admit it, something about the whole day felt prophetic, divined in a way that Trelawney would have loved and Blaise would have hated. So he met with Granger and had a decidedly uncomfortable conversation about respecting her healer’s wishes. He then borrowed Crookshanks in a split-second decision to just _go for it_ , dropped the cat off at his manor, and let Pansy drag him shopping in an effort to lift their spirits after so horribly disappointing Granger by siding with her healers. Being an upstanding friend was difficult work.

By the time Theo returned to the manor, forced by Pansy to don a new shirt in a frankly offensive shade of cerulean, it only made sense that the smell of smoke greeted him. He knew he couldn’t continue avoiding Blaise, and he didn’t want to, not really— well, only a little. He’d just yet to figure out how to face him after such a spectacular advance and retreat.

Theo followed the smoke to the parlor attached to the main Floo fireplace, one of the few places Theo hadn’t bothered ridding of its smoke-sullied furniture. That decision came from a practical place, purely because he used the room almost daily and relocating new, smoke-free furniture into the space seemed like more hassle than it was worth, especially if he’d just have to keep doing it over and over again.

He stopped at the threshold between rooms, halted under an enormous arch only superficially dividing them. He knew his footsteps would have already given him away. Theo hovered in the space between parlor and hallway. Between decisions. Between entire fucking states of being. In the grouted line between Brazilian granite and Italian marble lived the very line he’d spent a substantial amount of effort forgetting, never crossing.

Blaise sat in one of the armchairs facing mostly away from where Theo now stood, uncertain. Predictably, he had his feet propped up on the coffee table with a cigarette dangling from his fingers. Blaise didn’t acknowledge his arrival. Theo shifted his weight from foot to foot, unsure what to do in the awkward space between realizing the conversation was going to happen and actually having it, still perched on the precipice of something unknown and terrifying.

Theo could taste his unspoken words trying to launch themselves across the room, words he needed to share. Blaise, in quite an unexpected show of initiative, spoke first.

“I don’t want to wait for it either,” he said. The words sounded almost pained, like he’d forced them out against his better judgement. Theo heard him draw a deep breath through his nose and watched as he flicked at the cigarette with his thumb, sending a clump of ash tumbling to the ground.

Theo couldn’t help himself. He advanced.

“Not the Persian rugs, Blaise, I know they’re already ruined but—” he broke off.

Blaise’s attention snapped to him, suddenly alert, eyes round and wide. Theo felt his heart plummet; agony tore its way across Blaise’s face, mask shattering, confusion and disbelief and something like awe carved into every crevice, every line.

“Where did that shirt come from?” Blaise asked, tone rough, demanding.

“I know you’re an invested party in my wardrobe but— Pansy picked it out, made me change because—”

“Blue is a good color on you.”

“Yes, I know. You’ve been saying it for years.”

Blaise blinked, long and slow, as if forcing himself to break eye contact. He looked down at his own feet, propped against the antique table, and swung them to the floor. Theo watched, increasingly confused by the befuddlement before him, as Blaise brought the cigarette to his lips, inhaled, and then dropped his hand, letting the remainder fall to the ground.

Theo ducked, reaching for it, “Merlin, Blaise not on the—”

“ _Fucking Persian carpets_. I know.” And Blaise laughed: a startled sound. He stood from his seat, entire demeanor transformed, confusion evaporated under the heat of a hungry stare. “This is it,” he said and Theo barely understood the words as he heard them, low and almost threatening. Blaise said it again, quieter, under his breath and as if he could barely believe it himself, “this is it.”

“ _It_ it?” Theo asked, brain slogging under the weight of Blaise’s meaning. And then it struck, the confirmation about what Blaise had been waiting for; his heart skipped several beats as adrenaline lit his veins on fire. He took the bravest step of his life right into Blaise’s personal space. His throat had suddenly run very, very dry. 

“I couldn’t risk it,” Blaise said, a determined grimace twisting his mouth, guilt crowding out the awe in his features. Theo flinched, mostly out of surprise, heart hammering inside his chest when Blaise gripped his shirt— his _blue_ shirt— right along the placket, fisting the material. In another scene, a different conversation, it might have been a threatening action. But as it stood, it took a great deal of self-control for Theo to hold the pleased sounds he wanted to make inside his throat.

“This is what you Saw?” Theo asked, fucking daring himself to hope. “The important thing you’ve been waiting for?”

Theo’s hands had found Blaise’s shirt as well, a tight, almost aggressive grip on the fine fabric as the years of waiting he barely knew he’d been doing looked like they might culminate in something he hadn’t ever thought was possible. 

When he breathed, the expansion of his chest pressed Blaise’s fist into his own, a thing clawing inside, trying to get out, get to _him_. 

“It was the most important thing,” Blaise whispered and Theo agreed that words spoken at any real volume would have felt too big for the tiny space between them. This was a small moment, Theo could feel it, on the verge of being blown wide open. 

“The most important thing,” Theo repeated, having to taste the words in order to believe them. 

He felt confunded, brain matter slipping from his ears as he tried to connect fantasy to reality. Because surely this couldn’t be _real_.

“You,” Blaise said and it tore Theo’s heart from his chest. “And this,” Blaise added, grip on Theo’s shirt tightening. “I couldn’t risk it,” he said again, for what felt like the thousandth time but only really, truly made sense for the first time. Because even though they both hovered along a border they’d yet to cross, the thought of never getting this close turned Theo’s stomach: terror for the loss of a thing he didn’t even have, not yet.

“I’m going to make you say it,” Theo said through a half smile of disbelief, anticipation. He’d waited years, literal years, for Blaise to share the thing he Saw. And even now, while very nearly sharing the air between them, he refused for there to be any chance at misinterpretation. Never mind the fact that he could feel Blaise’s heartbeat pounding beneath his fists as Theo held onto his shirt. In a moment that nearly broke every bit of Theo’s self control, Blaise rolled his eyes, a tiny smile pulling at his mouth.

“This room,” he said. “I had my feet up. I had a cigarette. You were wearing blue, the Persian carpets,” the words tumbled faster and faster with each syllable. “This—” he looked down between them, hands fisting fabrics. “And this—” Blaise’s other hand found Theo’s jaw, holding him steady.

“What else?” Theo considered it a miracle he got the words out; he felt like his entire face had melted from a single set of fingers searing their prints along his jawline. 

“Of right now? Not much,” Blaise paused, drew a deep breath, and stared at Theo fully unmasked for what might have been the first time since he’d Seen the thing he’d hidden for so long. “But there were other flashes. A whole fucking lifetime of them.”

Theo broke: any and all reservations crumbling to join the rubble of bricks and masks shattered like busts around them. He surged forward, pulling the fabric in his hands to his own chest and pressing his lips to Blaise’s: hungry and desperate and dying for more. If this was _it,_ then he fully intended on making it count.

In his darker fantasies, the ones he let himself have when he knew he shouldn’t, Theo never made it past this point, past the initial impulse to taste the shape of Blaise’s mouth. Because he’d never entertained the possibility that it could go any further than that, that it wouldn’t end with a sharp shove to the chest, breaking them apart because of his agonizingly one-sided desire. 

Well, there was certainly a shove to Theo’s chest, followed by a string of curses, then knees and legs knocking together as Blaise pinned him against the nearest wall. 

“ _Fuck_ ,” fell from Theo’s mouth as Blaise’s hips collided with his own, bodies pressed together from knee to chest. He could barely breathe, lungs rendered irrelevant as his mouth moved on to more important things: like memorizing the feel of Blaise’s lower lip, the exact shape of his cupid's bow, and the taste of his tongue brushing against his own. 

Blaise shifted his hand from Theo’s jaw, running along the side of his neck to the back of his head. Theo desperately wanted to trail a similar path with his mouth along Blaise’s jaw, to kiss his way from lips to jaw and back again. But he couldn’t bring himself to break away from the feast offered by Blaise’s mouth, from the absolute awe of having an impossible thing, an offering to taste and touch and feel.

Theo let his hands fall from where they’d gripped Blaise’s shirt. His fingers skimmed the hard surface of his chest and stomach, mapping muscles with hungry hands. Blaise groaned and it tasted like tobacco and whiskey and years of waiting. Blaise ground his hips forward, nearly blacking out every thought inside Theo’s head with the realization that Blaise wanted this— wanted _him_ — just as much. Somehow, Blaise was just as affected by such touch, such proximity. It was absurd. Impossible. And yet: happening.

It was the impetus Theo needed to begin tearing at Blaise’s shirt buttons: frantic and frenzied and so fucking turned on he could barely stand it. He stalled, a moan ripped from somewhere low in his throat when Blaise pulled the shirttails from Theo’s trousers, beautiful fire trailing fingers grazing the skin just above his belt line. 

Blaise grabbed at his belt, tearing himself away long enough to breathe the single greatest set of syllables Theo had ever heard.

“Bedroom?”

Two syllables. Theo could count them on his fingers, but really he ought to count his blessings that he didn’t pass out right then and there.

“Bedroom,” he agreed. 

Theo had to stop Blaise when he reluctantly stepped away, clearly intending on walking to the bedroom like a fucking peasant. Theo pulled him close again, stealing another kiss, letting his hands wander Blaise’s exposed chest before winding them to his shoulders. Theo finally trailed that path of kisses he’d wondered about, an open-mouthed exploration of teeth and tongue along Blaise’s jaw, savoring every agonized sound wrought from his touch. He paused at Blaise’s ear.

“I have a portkey,” Theo whispered. He could feel the vibrations in Blaise’s chuckle, chests pressed together, throat held hostage beneath Theo’s tongue.

“Of course you do,” Blaise said, grip on Theo’s belt redoubled. His vision swam when Blaise’s hand dipped, gripping him through the fabric of his trousers. “Use it.”

Theo didn’t need to be told twice. He’d used thousands of portkeys in his life, spent years perfecting the nuanced art of it, had travelled to all manner of destination, in groups, by himself, sitting, standing, mid-stride. But never with a man’s hand on his cock, his own lips pressed against said man’s throat, and damn near incoherent with lust. Theo determined, based on new evidence, that this was the best way to travel by portkey. 

— 

They landed— effortlessly, easily, so fucking perfectly— mere feet from Theo’s bed. Hardly sparing the time to catch his breath or shake the slight sense of spinning, Theo turned them, pushing Blaise towards the bed. They broke apart as Blaise sank onto it, panting and grinning and looking like the debauched fantasy Theo never dared let himself dream of. 

Frantic, Theo undid the last two buttons of his shirt that somehow remained fastened, letting it fall to the ground. Watching Blaise do the same to his own shirt nearly unraveled the frayed edges of Theo’s sanity; Blaise Zabini was in his bed, shirtless, and looking just as ravenous as Theo felt.

The distance had already gone on too long; Blaise seemed to agree, reaching out and pulling Theo on top of him. 

Theo dropped a kiss to Blaise’s collarbone, tasting his skin and testing it with teeth. He tasted like the mediterranean, like a vineyard, like sunlight poured into a mold of skin and bone. 

“We could have been doing this years ago,” Theo said, stifling a groan as Blaise slid his belt from the loops of his trousers. “You’re an idiot,” he concluded.

“Yes,” Blaise said. Somehow infuriatingly, gloriously, predictably reticent as ever.

Theo closed his eyes, needing a moment just to feel as he ground his hips against Blaise’s, torn between the sensation of such delightful friction and the uncomfortable cage his trousers had become. Blaise’s hand found his jaw again, forcing Theo to look up, demanding eye contact.

“It’s worth it though,” Blaise said, suddenly so still, so serious. “I Saw it.”

Theo’s brows pulled together, eyes slamming shut, incapable of withstanding the intensity of such a stare, such a transparent declaration. He took a deep breath in the darkness behind his closed lids: silent and still and tangled up with Blaise, warmth from his skin keeping Theo rooted to reality. He had no precedent for such transparency, not with Blaise. When he opened his eyes, all Theo could think to do was kiss him again, kiss him with the promise to keep doing so, for as long as he was allowed.

“I’m sorry,” Blaise said in the tiny pauses between breaths, teeth tugging at Theo’s bottom lip, hips rocking with increasing urgency. Blaise’s fingers, those beautiful fucking fingers, descended to Theo’s trousers, thumbing the button free, dragging the zipper down. 

“I know,” was all Theo managed, brain locked into a single purpose: touch. Strangely, acknowledging the winding path they’d taken to get to this point seemed to release the thing from his chest, clawing at his ribs, dying to escape and find its way into the very fabric of Blaise’s skin.

Theo felt certain that, for a moment, just long enough to last the span of his eyes closing and opening again, he’d simply blinked out of existence. Reality disconnected, sanity finally unraveled. Blaise’s hand slipped inside his pants, not bothering to shove them down or get them out of the way and Theo _agreed_ , so fucking much, that to do such a thing would be to waste far too much time. Obscenities tumbled from his mouth, entirely beyond his permission or control, a verbal deluge set to drown them. And what a beautiful way to go, rocking forward into Blaise’s hand, breath catching from the fervor and the flood. 

But Theo stopped, his skin prickled, alert and concerned at a sudden shift in the room’s air pressure. It was a subtle sensation, one he knew only by virtue of having used more portkeys than he could even begin to count. Blaise sensed the change in his demeanor, stilling too. His arousal flagged, something uneasy sinking in his stomach. 

Theo craned to look behind them, to the place where they’d portkeyed into the room together mere minutes before.

Hermione Granger stood in that spot, looking ill and flushed red from head to toe, eyes unfocused. The key in her hand clattered to the ground, bouncing on the hard granite floors with a tinny _cling_ that sliced through Theo’s eardrums and burrowed into his brain. Ridiculously, distantly, he thought how he might never forget that sound. She fell a moment later, utterly boneless. 

Theo jumped to his feet, already halfway to her by the time she fully hit the floor. He recoiled, stomach twisting at the sound of a crack, a disgusting impact of her skull against the hard tile. He pushed forward, nearly vomiting then and there from the sight of the blood spilling onto his pristine, ancestral tiles. Theo’s heartbeat thundered inside his skull. He barely heard Blaise behind him.

Theo slid to the floor, on his knees, as he pulled Hermione into his arms, experiencing absolute and complete panic in a way he hadn’t since the war. Not since sitting in the same room as the Dark Lord, since watching murder for sport and swallowing the agony of passive participation.

“I need a—” Theo started.

Blaise pressed a key into the hand Theo didn’t have wrapped around his blood-soaked friend, clutching her to his chest. 

“It’s one to St. Mungo’s,” Blaise said. “I’ll find Draco. Go.” 

Shirtless, terrified, and now covered in blood, Theo activated the portkey and noted, based on new evidence, that he’d just discovered the worst way to use this particular method of travel. 

—

**Is it even a Friday if you don’t end up in jail?: November 2nd, 2007**

Theo barely remembered the series of events following his frantic arrival at St. Mungo’s with Hermione in his arms, unconscious, reeking of deadly potions fumes, and bleeding from a literal crack in her skull. The flurry of panic consisted of healers trying to calm him, Draco and Potter showing up minutes later covered in soot, and Blaise finally finding him and wrapping a supportive arm around his waist like it was the easiest thing in the world. Despite the chaos, Theo couldn’t help but fixate on one single, extraneous detail.

“Crookshanks,” he’d said, voice wrecked from shouts and sobs and the vice grip of fear around his vocal cords.

Blaise just nodded, pulling Theo into a hug as they stood together, hovering in the waiting area.

Crookshanks was still happily at Nott Manor, safe from the explosion that tore Hermione and Draco’s flat apart, obliterating everything. 

“Did you change something? Having me take Crookshanks?”

Blaise shook his head, “No. I just had to make you do it. Sometimes the future requires I participate, sometimes it doesn’t.” Theo wasn’t sure if that made him feel better or worse.

Several days of worry and frustratingly few updates later, Draco showed up at the manor looking haggard and broken and like a man stuck in a life on repeat: waiting for a wife in the hospital, hoping she’ll know him when she wakes.

“I just left the DMLE,” Draco said in greeting.

“You what?” Theo froze, standing by the fireplace where he’d been engaged in an admittedly heavy dose of brooding.

“They tried to arrest me, Potter stepped in. Held them off for a while at least.”

Draco sat on the arm of a chair, clearly not intending to get too comfortable. Theo held a shallow breath in his chest, too afraid to let it out. He knew. Instantly. _He knew_.

“Was it the time turner or the portkeys?” Theo asked, giving voice to the illegal objects Hermione had hidden in their guest room for him. The objects in the very room that exploded and destroyed their home, nearly killing her.

“The time turner,” Draco said. He dropped his head, hands grabbing at his hair. “They found it in the wreckage. The Department of Mysteries has it, they— they think it could be part of why she lost her memory to begin with, too.”

Guilt plummeted off a ledge in Theo’s stomach, hurtling towards the ground and crashing with enough force that he had to grip the nearby mantle. He flushed hot, then cold, shamed from head to toe— oh no. No, no, _no._

“I’m not going to let them arrest you for possession of _my_ illegal turner.” Theo barely recognized the control over his own voice, so surprisingly even, as he said it. His chest felt like it might implode: a concave entity opening up behind his sternum, diaphragm twisted into nothingness, heart and lungs simply vanished, ribs annihilated.

“Theo, she— she knew what she was doing. I—” Draco didn’t finish his thought, breaking off, head dropping even further as he braced his hands against his knees, breathing heavy.

With the recent implosion in his ribcage, Theo mourned the loss of the thing in his chest he’d just truly discovered. He’d barely had the opportunity to introduce it to the feeling of Blaise’s pulse beneath his lips, and the steady pressure of desire thrumming like a living object between them, before their lives had flipped upside down for the last few days. He would miss that feeling. On the tail end of that loss, Theo wished he knew more about Azkaban’s policies on conjugal visits.

He pulled a portkey from his pocket, the one he’d had on him since the moment Blaise gifted it to him for his birthday. He took a step forward and offered it to Draco.

“Will you give this to Blaise?” Theo’s throat squeezed shut against his will. Draco looked up, confused and exhausted; he took the key and stared in question.

“Why?”

“Just— tell him I hope he was right about the lifetime thing—” Theo had to clear his throat. He took a deep breath, had to steal himself, force himself, really, to do the thing a Gryffindor would do. 

He apparated, wishing it were a portkey, straight to the Ministry where he turned himself in for the creation and possession of an exceptionally illegal time turner, insisting he hid at the Malfoy’s flat entirely without their knowledge.

It hurt, Theo decided, loving people the way he did, the way he’d always wanted for himself. He loved Draco as the brother he wished he had, and he’d sacrifice anything for him if necessary. He loved Pansy as his monarch, ready to go to war at her command. He loved Granger for generosity, for loving him when he didn’t deserve it. He’d willingly walk into Azkaban for her. 

And he’d loved Blaise from behind a brick wall, waiting. He supposed he could love him from behind a set of irons bars, too. 

—

**Days don’t exist when incarcerated: November 7th, 2007**

Apparently Harry Potter was on Theo’s side. At least tentatively, or temporarily, or more than likely at the behest of one very angry Draco Malfoy who’d arrived at the Ministry just minutes too late to stop Theo from turning himself in. If Theo felt grateful for anything, it was the fact that Potter had somehow managed to stall his inevitable transfer to Azkaban for the last five days, providing only the cagiest of answers about administrative backlogs in the few moments Theo had to inquire.

Potter made it clear to Theo that while whatever administrative mess regarding his arrest got sorted, he would be permitted no visitors outside his solicitor, who was particularly upset about the whole willing confession component to Theo’s arrest. So Theo sat in a cell, bored out of his mind, with no connections to the world around him.

“She woke up,” Potter said, announcing his arrival for the first time in several days. 

Theo bolted upright on the metal bench in the holding cell that had become his new home. Conveniently, this home didn’t have any shadows with teeth. Which, if Theo were ever going to try and see the bright side of something, this was probably his opportunity. 

“Hermione’s awake? Is she— okay? Is she okay?” Theo rose, walking to the bars and beseeching with every fiber of his being that Potter took pity on him, that he not draw this out. Theo had to know. 

“She was released from the hospital today,” Potter said, watching Theo with a look of open evaluation. “She woke up a couple days ago. She’s fine— the skelegrow repaired her skull nicely.”

Theo’s knuckles turned white from the pressure of holding himself up against the bars of his cell. His legs felt weak, jellied from days of disuse and the overwhelming relief that Hermione was alive. In the darker moments of his recent solitude, Theo had wondered at how he would survive if Hermione didn’t. He wasn’t sure he could, not with his own culpability at play. How much of this could have been avoided if she hadn’t been hiding illegal trinkets for him? 

Theo tried to ask a question, to verbalize the other fears floating inside his head. But the words caught in his throat, scraped through a desert stretching from his tongue to his lungs. Thankfully Potter, with that unnerving sense of _knowing_ he sometimes seemed to have, offered more information.

“She didn’t lose any more memory, but she didn’t get any back either.” Potter leaned carefully against the wall opposite Theo’s cell, still assessing.

Theo finally slumped, feeling hollowed out with his fear gone. The relief wasn’t enough to fill the empty spaces. He assumed guilt would take up residence soon enough, a malevolent squatter in his home and heart.

“Why?” Potter asked. 

This was officially the longest conversation Theo had ever had with Harry Potter, excluding his actual arrest wherein _Auror_ Potter asked him a series of questions with increasing disbelief at his answers. But this was Harry Potter, not his professional counterpart. This was Hermione’s lifelong best friend asking him a question and Theo had already forgotten what it was.

“What?” Theo asked from his place on his knees. He still held the bars in front of him, staring at the nothingness in the air between them, eyes unfocused. 

“Why are you sitting in a cell in my department right now?”

“You put me here.”

“You walked in and took the blame for something we both know you could have gotten away with. The turner was in Hermione’s flat. There was no connection to you.”

Theo focused his eyes again, tearing himself from the void. He looked at Potter, green eyes behind glasses, not all that different from his own. 

“You Gryffindors don’t have a monopoly on bravery, you know.” Theo _almost_ believed it as he said it. And perhaps if he said it often enough, thought it hard enough to himself, he could find a way to believe it one day.

“No, we don’t. I usually expect more self-preservation from a Slytherin, though.”

Theo almost laughed, and maybe he would have if he hadn’t also felt a bit like crying.

“Maybe I was a Gryffindor-Slytherin hatstall.” _The horror_. 

Potter did laugh, a short, bark of a sound that startled them both. 

“I don’t think so,” Harry said, that strange auror _knowing_ emanating from his stare. “That was me.”

Theo couldn’t tell if Potter was joking or not. And he didn’t have the energy to figure it out. He shrugged, leaning forward and letting his forehead rest against the bar. 

“Hermione would have been fine,” Theo said, trying to explain what was probably inexplicable. Potter wasn’t wrong. Theo didn’t _have_ to take the blame for any of this. “But Draco? He’s got a Dark Mark on his arm. I know how illegal my time turner is. It would have been a ticket to Azkaban he doesn’t deserve.”

“And you deserve Azkaban more than Draco Malfoy?”

“I don’t deserve it less.”

Potter narrowed his eyes and Theo could feel him hunting for a lie. Theo didn’t have the energy to be duplicitous. He had nothing to gain from dishonesty.

“In that case, I’m sorry,” Potter said.

Theo’s head jerked away from the bars, a movement of disbelief.

“You’re what?”

“I saw the kinds of dark artifacts that came out of your manor. The ones Hermione _did_ turn over. I probably haven’t given you a very fair chance the past couple of years.”

Theo had to remind himself that breathing was essential to consciousness. He couldn’t quite make sense of Potter’s sudden reversal.

“I’m impressed,” Potter said in a kind of conclusion, pushing off the wall. “And Hermione loves you, so— I’m trying.”

Did Harry Potter, actual savior of the entire fucking wizarding world, just give Theo a compliment? Furthermore, did he just admit that he would _help_ Theo?

But before Theo could give voice to any of his disbelieving thoughts, Potter had already let himself out, leaving Theo alone again.

Feeling numb, Theo returned to his metal bench, his own kind of sofa vigil. With a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach, something like pride and shame and disbelief battling for dominance, he realized he’d probably have to start calling Potter by his first name. 

—

**Not a Friday, but a free day: November 15th, 2007**

Potter— Harry, no, _fuck_ that’s weird— was true to his word, as Theo supposed he probably had been for the entirety of his miraculous life. It took eight days on top of the five he’d already spent in a cell: nearly two full weeks incarcerated, thankfully within the walls of the DMLE and _not_ Azkaban. But in the end, Harry and Hermione had found some administrative loophole, something silly and inconsequential to call the legality of his holding into question.

And then he heard that Harry Potter, _the_ Harry Potter, had taken a slap on the wrist for poor handling of Theo’s case.

Quid pro quo certainly looked different in red and gold. 

By the time Theo returned to his home, begged Hermione for forgiveness, and damn near broke into tears at her generosity, he didn’t have the energy to do anything but fall into his bed, still clothed, feeling brittle and broken and overwhelmed by the turn his life had taken over the last thirteen days.

He barely woke when the weight shifted in the bed behind him, a warm, strong arm winding around his chest. He didn’t have to open his eyes to know it was Blaise; his calming aura and scent like sunlight gave him away. Theo felt some of his emotional weight melt away, soothed.

“They wouldn’t let me visit,” Blaise said in a quiet voice, air ghosting across the back of Theo’s neck. 

Theo reached up with one hand and held Blaise’s forearm, trying to convey through touch that he knew, and that it was okay, and that he wasn’t going to ask if he’d Seen any of this. 

“Draco gave me the portkey,” Blaise said.

“I didn’t want them to take it.”

Blaise’s grip around Theo tightened. Theo pulled at his arm to loosen it, rolling instead to face him.

Blaise looked so— normal. His perfectly poised and pulled together pieces had a softness to their edges. He looked hopeful, honest, raw in a way so unfamiliar that Theo felt for a moment like he’d forgotten to breathe, remembering it suddenly with a startled need to inhale. 

Blaise met that motion with a kiss, the press of desperate lips against Theo’s own. Theo hadn’t known what to expect after being released, not after thirteen days left to wonder. Had his frenzy with Blaise been an impulse, a dream, a moment so fragile that it couldn’t survive the things that came after?

But this— this tasted of something like _finally_. It quelled any and all of Theo’s concerns.

“When you say you Saw a lifetime,” Theo said, running a hand along Blaise’s neck and jaw, warmth blooming in his chest. The place where he thought guilt might stake a claim flooded with something else, something warm and safe and similar to sunlight.

Even in the growing twilight of his unlit bedroom, Theo saw a flash of uncertainty in Blaise’s eyes, a fragment of fear that escaped. But Blaise held his gaze, a kind of determination settling in the way he drew a breath and flexed his fingertips where they gripped at Theo’s hip.

“I meant that so long as you’re amenable, you’re stuck with me for a very long time.”

Theo really, truly, needed to learn to handle sincerity better. The quip flew from his lips before he could stop it.

“So no more boyfriend trawling then?”

Blaise looked at him with a split second of disbelief before using the hand on Theo’s hip to pull him closer, as flush as they could possibly be.

“Do you have any idea what kind of torture that was?” Blaise asked just before he launched an assault on Theo’s throat: warm lips, hot tongue, the gentle pressure of teeth.

“To be fair, if you’d just told me…” Theo didn’t have the heart to finish that sentence, not when he felt how Blaise stiffened, uncertainty washing over him.

“I know,” he said against Theo’s neck.

“Well, just so you know—” Theo started, wringing every ounce of sincerity and bravery from his bones. “I am amenable. Entirely amenable.”

Blaise pulled back from Theo’s throat, staring up at him with a look that said even though he’d Seen it, known it for however many years it had been, he still hadn’t truly believed it. That little slice of uncertainty, over the worry that maybe, despite all evidence to the contrary, his Sight had been wrong, told Theo everything he could ever need to know about how important it had been to him all these years. 

Theo smiled, he couldn’t help it. Not even an appearance from the thing with teeth could dampen this high.

“I do have a question,” Theo said. “Do I ever get a cat?”

Theo decided that in the war against the thing that hid in the shadows of his home, the deep timbre of Blaise’s laughter was the best defense. 

—

**The first Friday in a long time that felt like a Friday: December 7th, 2007**

Hermione Granger arrived early. Theo didn’t expect his friends to start showing up for the official reinstatement of their standing Friday social plans for another hour or so: hence his surprise at finding her in his home.

She sat on the large table in the center of Theo’s family library, legs crossed beneath her, enormous tome open on her lap. The surrounding sea of book debris, casualties from his particularly bad night of drinking months earlier, had been left to rot like corpses on a battlefield.

“Aren’t you a sight,” Theo said, leaning against the door frame. He only felt a twinge of guilt, this time mostly literature related, in her presence. She was sure to have feelings about the offensive state of his library.

Hermione looked up from her book and smiled at him, a picture of serenity. 

“I miss my books,” she said, a touch of wistfulness hiding behind her words.

“Right, explosion. Fire.” Her books, along with just about everything else in her flat, had burned to a crisp.

She closed the book in her lap and set it to the side, uncrossed her legs and swung them to dangle off the edge of the table.

“I thought I’d borrow a few of yours. But,” she made a small gesture to the chaos around her. “Looks like you’re…reorganizing?” she asked it as a question, but Theo saw the smirk tugging at her lips. 

Every day. Every single day he saw her she looked and felt and acted a little more like herself, like that magnificent brain of hers was slowly sorting through the pieces of her life and lining them up all neat and proper, just how Hermione Granger liked it. Even without her memories of the last six years, at least for now, she’d somehow made room for him in her life again.

Theo stuck his foot out, toeing one of the fallen books on the floor nearby.

“How did you even manage to get over there?” he asked. “Don’t tell me you walked all over a bunch of books, Granger?”

She lifted her brows, watching him with open amusement.

“Magic,” she said.

Theo rolled his eyes and pulled out his wand, ordering the books back into the stacks he’d organized months earlier. 

“I wasn’t reorganizing exactly,” he said. “I was sorting. I wanted to give quite a few of them to you and Draco. I suppose now you have the space for them.”

Her eyes went wide, watching in wonder at his magic as he rebuilt the maze of books around them. He joined her at the table, leaning against it as he continued forcing the books into neat stacks.

“You’re giving us books?” she asked, eyes still following the magic stacking the books into a labyrinth around them.

“I don’t need them. I don’t really use them. And especially now that you lost all yours, it makes even more sense.”

“But they belong here,” she said. Theo heard the hesitation, the regret in her voice. Granger and books; he almost laughed. “You shouldn’t empty your family library.”

He leaned his shoulder against hers.

“It’s just me here, Granger. Well— and the thing in the shadows.”

He was so used to saying it like that, casually, flippantly, glib like he was expected to be. He wasn’t prepared for her to ask about it.

“Why do you do that?”

“Do what?” But his heart had already stuttered painfully, a quick clench between beats.

“Talk about the shadows here like they’re alive.” 

She looked at him, concern written in the kind lines at the corners of her eyes.

“They’re not alive,” he said. “Just occupied.”

“By what?”

His heart clenched again. Even Blaise never asked this many questions. Perhaps Hermione without six years of memories didn’t have the same qualms about prodding at his demon as everyone else did.

“Something with teeth.”

She seemed to consider that, pulling her legs back up onto the table, crossed again. She looked at him, held tilted to the side, and he could see the assessment calculating through her eyes, trying to parse sincerity from the insincere. 

“An interesting way to phrase it,” she said.

Theo laughed, “Well that one’s mostly your fault.”

She quirked her head, just enough that he could tell she registered the disconnect, a memory only one of them shared. She simply waited for him to elaborate.

“You were drunk off your arse,” he said. “You were talking about muggle wars, a favorite topic of yours, quite a fascinating quirk in my opinion. You kept giggling about a muggle saying about not attacking until you can see the whites of your enemy’s eyes— apparently you thought the turn of phrase worked better with the whites of their teeth— something about your parents. At least I think that’s what you intended.”

He leaned into her shoulder again. 

“You were _very_ drunk.” He laughed again when she crossed her arms, suppressing her own smile in what he could only assume was a failed attempt at indignation. 

“It has teeth,” he said. “The thing in the shadows. It doesn’t smile though, rarely speaks, so I know if I ever see the whites, I’m probably in trouble.”

Hermione’s amusement faded, watching him again, this time like she’d just realized something with such force that it froze her every muscle.

“Theo—” she started.

Draco’s voice called to them from the entrance to the library, now obscured by the towers of sorted books.

 **“** Well, I have a feeling I know where my wife is.” Draco’s laugh wound its way through the labyrinth. Theo jumped on the opportunity to avoid whatever utterly brilliant insight Hermione had been about to bestow him with. 

“Come on, Granger. Let’s see if we can escape this place, shall we?” 

She saw straight through his performance, she usually did, but this time in particular, he knew she saw him more clearly than she probably ever had. He pulled her by the hand, forced her off the table, and ushered her towards Draco.

He lingered back, trailing behind as she navigated between the stacks of books representing centuries of accumulated knowledge curated by his family. Knowledge he wanted his friends to have.

He turned a corner and found himself face to face with the thing with teeth, standing in full light, not a single shadow to surround it. 

It fumed.

“A _muggle_ saying?” it— he, no— _it_ said.

Theo stared it down, hating it. But also wanting, absurdly, to laugh at it. 

“Knew that would annoy you,” Theo shrugged in an attempt at embodying the devastating disinterest Blaise could send shooting like an arrow, nocked and aimed directly at one’s pride. 

Theo stepped through it, shivered, and navigated the last few stacks of books before emerging at the entrance to the library. He joined his friends and didn’t look back, knowing the thing with teeth would be watching. 

—

**The Winter Solstice, honestly the best fucking Friday, also Blaise’s birthday: December 21st, 2007**

Blaise found him sitting in the center of an intricate circle of runes painted on the foyer floor.

“Theo, what is—”

“I’m not doing it,” he said, voice quiet as he stared at the rune directly in front of him, ironically, the one that translated to _sacrifice_.

“Do what? What is this?” Blaise asked as he stood at the edge of the circle, rightfully wary of crossing the line of complicated, ancient symbols. “It looks like—” Blaise continued, craning to translate the runes nearest him.

Blaise froze, staring at the object on the floor next to where Theo sat. 

Theo pulled out his wand and, with a wave and a familiar incantation that still turned his stomach after all these years, the symbols on the floor began to glow, shooting a foot into the air, rotating around him.

“These are the estate’s wards,” Theo said, devoid of any real emotion. His stomach churned. He picked up the knife from the floor beside him. “It’s old, dark, blood magic, renewed on the winter solstice.”

He rotated the knife in his hand as he considered, perhaps for the thousandth time in the last few months, the implications of abstaining. His stomach dropped when he looked up at Blaise, horror rippling through his features, muscles tensing, jaw clenching.

“I’m tired of bleeding for this place.”

“You hate blood.”

“I do.”

“Don’t do it then.” It sounded so simple when Blaise put it that way, just a few words against several centuries of ritual, ancestral blood soaked into expensive tile floors.

“The Estate won’t— fair very well, without them.”

“It’s already mostly empty, what does it matter? You’ve sold or given away almost everything.”

Theo set the knife down, ornate bone handle making a hollow sort of sound as it connected with the floor. The illuminated runes still rotated around him, at perfect eye level to where he sat: _sacrifice, fidelity, protection, strength, esteem, loyalty_ and so on. All the many and varied things that generations of Notts before him had deemed essential to the family’s success, to its legacy.

And then there was Theo, last of them all.

“I sold most of the furniture because you ruined it,” he said, allowing himself a tiny smirk, something to break the roiling inside his stomach.

“You wanted me to.”

“How do you figure?”

“You never told me to stop.”

“Of course I did,” Theo said, wondering what alternative reality Blaise thought he’d been living in.

“No, you didn’t. You complained, but you never once seriously told me to stop smoking in your home. Granger did and I stopped. You could have told me not to.”

“I—” Theo truly didn’t know what to say to that. It was patently absurd.

“I’ve been helping you clear it out,” Blaise said with a gesture to the empty foyer around them.

“Why?”

“You tell me.”

“Aren’t you the Seer?”

“Not a very good one.”

“I hate this place,” Theo admitted.

“I know. The demons.”

“Just the one.”

Blaise cocked his head, still watching from his place at the edge of the circle. Theo realized the thing with teeth was probably in the room with them, hidden in one of the many shadows cast on the darkest day of the year. It had a vested interest in the wards, in the continuity of this place.

It felt like a bolt of lightning, piercing through the solid roof of his ancestral home and shooting straight to Theo’s spine: the sudden, axis shifting realization that he didn’t care. He didn’t care, not with one single cell of his being, what happened to this place. He’d been emptying it because he hated it. And he hated it because he didn’t care. Not anymore. 

“It’s my father.”

Blaise didn’t move. Didn’t respond. Just looked at Theo with that same look of confusion. Theo thought he saw the thing with teeth moving then, drifting from one shadow to another, agitated and likely moments from lashing out.

Theo stood, feeling like he shed most of his weight, leaving it in the middle of that circle. He cancelled the ward spells and stepped into Blaise’s grasp. He _accio’d_ a portkey to the front gates and sent them hurtling.

At the edge of the property, with his enormous estate looming in the dark, Theo turned to Blaise and elaborated under the dim light of a new moon.

“The thing with teeth. It’s my father.”

Blaise looked at him as if he’d spoken another language, attempted communication in tongues, a poor attempt at pantomime.

“I don’t understand,” Blaise’s words came out slowly, carefully spoken and edged with a swelling disbelief that said, perhaps, he understood more than he wanted to.

“I never hid it,” Theo said. “I just never elaborated. It’s my father’s ghost. Mean fucking bastard—”

Blaise shoved him by the shoulders, a strike so sudden Theo nearly toppled to the ground, heels seeking traction on pointless decorative gravel.

“Are you telling me that you have been _literally_ haunted by your dead, psychopathic, absolute cunt of a father, Theodore Nott, and you didn’t fucking tell me?”

“I mean, honestly, when you put it like that—”

“How long?”

“What do you mean how long? Since he died, technically.”

Blaise growled, actually growled. Something low rumbled from his chest as he stepped towards Theo, grabbing a fistful of his shirt, so like the first time they’d kissed.

“Almost ten years? Ten years—” So close, Theo could see nearly every detail of Blaise’s face, even in the darkness of early night on a winter solstice. Despite the anger, there was something refreshing about being able to see it at all, mask obliterated. He’d always hated that fucking thing.

“I didn’t know about him for the first five, he hid in the workshop—”

“Five years is still several years too many, Theo.”

Some of Blaise’s anger fizzled, the harsh breath he used to propel his words softening. He looked at Theo, something pleading, something _devastated_ in his eyes.

“You’re moving in with me,” Blaise finally said. It wasn’t a question, not this time. He’d asked the question six months earlier, Theo just didn’t see it for what it was at the time. Just as his friends never saw his half truths about the thing with teeth for what they really were, either. Purposefully roundabout, obscured by insecurity.

“I know,” Theo said, pulling the portkey Blaise had given him for his birthday out of his pocket. He pulled a second, identical copy out as well. “Happy birthday.”

“A key to my own home for my birthday?” Blaise asked, a single brow lifted. Theo almost gave into the impulse to kiss the smirk off of his face.

“It’s a portkey and you know it.”

“To wherever you are?”

“Wherever I am.”

Blaise took the gift, turning it once in his fingers, wonder dancing in the glow of dim moonlight reflected in his eyes. 

“I suppose that settles it, then,” Blaise said.

“Settles what?”

Blaise jerked his head in the direction of the manor, an imposing shadow silhouetted against a not-quite-black sky dotted with stars.

“We’re burning it down.”

“My house? You want to burn down my family home?”

“No, I think you do. You’re already letting the wards go. You’ve liquidated almost all its assets. And apparently it’s fucking _haunted_.”

Theo looked towards the great hulking thing he hated. 

“I can’t do that.”

“Would it help if I told you I Saw it?” Blaise asked on the cusp of a tease.

“Did you?”

Blaise reached out, forcing their hands together, each holding a key to the other.

“This is your home.” He squeezed their hands tighter, odd metal angles digging into his palm. “That building isn’t, not anymore. It’s a prison.”

An unintentional bubble of laughter escaped him.

“I can say from experience: I’m not a huge fan of prison.”

Blaise smiled and it pulled the air from Theo’s lungs. 

Theo let his decision settle in his bones before agreeing. He muttered the words, tiny flames erupting at his fingertips, a useful little spell, the one they’d all learned for the purposes of sneaking cigarettes and lighting rolls of parchment on fire for fun.

“Should we start small?” Theo asked, utterly lost in the way the orange light illuminated Blaise’s face, not unlike sunlight.

In the absence of his sixteenth century jacquards, seventeenth century brocades, eighteenth century rugs, nineteenth century tapestries, and a twentieth century war-torn legacy: Theo opted for a twenty-first century beginning. And it required fire to be reborn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oops i slipped and posted early- it's friday somewhere in the world!
> 
> many thanks to icepower55 and EndlessMoonChild who tell me when my sentences are too long and when i forget to grammar correctly. they are my heroes and they both have active WIPs happening! check them out!
> 
> and itty bitty baby epilogue will be posted saturday during my AMA over on discord! check out my tumblr for more info! come hang out with me!!


	5. A Prologue in the Shape of an Epilogue

**June 21st, 1995**

It came to Blaise in a flash. He’d been lounging by the lake on Theo’s birthday as Draco distracted them from exam preparation by trying to teach them all a wandless spell for starting little fires. Blaise supposed it was better than constant talk of Potter and the impending finale to the Triwizard Tournament. He’d had enough of that to last him several lifetimes.

Blaise pulled a knee to his chest, absently toying with blades of grass as he started to wonder if maybe he ought to try making new friends— his were clearly idiots, trying so hard to start a fire just so they  _ could _ . He looked at Theo, hunched awkwardly from growing nearly a whole foot over the course of the year. Blaise couldn’t hear the spell, not from where he sat against a tree, but he saw the moment the flame came to life at his fingertips. Draco whooped nearby and the two of them marveled at the tiny, transient flame at Theo’s fingers.

But then Blaise wasn’t there anymore. Or rather, he found himself in two places at once: watching Theo play with fire by the lake and also watching a much older version of Theo ducking into his periphery.

It was like being a passenger inside his own head, watching a new scene with his own eyes but with no control over the body he inhabited, present but disconnected.

Blaise turned, cataloguing in a matter of moments that he had his feet propped on a table— how disrespectful— and a cigarette held between his fingers— how vile. Then his eyes landed on Theo, wearing a blue button down and looking mature, and  _ handsome _ , and a little annoyed.

“Not the Persian rugs, Blaise, I know they’re already ruined but—” Blaise felt himself tense, startled by words that had no reason to startle him. But nevertheless, his eyes went wide and he had to— just  _ had to _ ask— 

“Where did that shirt come from?” 

Blaise’s world tilted, time stopping and stalling and lurching forward at an impossible pace. Whatever he’d been able to hold onto of his reality— by the lake, rooted firmly in 1995— dissolved as the other scene, the scene very evidently in the  _ future _ , solidified. 

Blaise felt his stomach drop.

“This is it.”

The circular implication alone was enough to send him spinning. How long did he, would he, wait for the moment he was only now glimpsing? What did the waiting mean?

“I couldn’t risk it.”

What couldn’t be risked? This version of events? Blaise watched with wonder, through his own eyes and only passively aware of the way his own body moved as his hand fisted the blue fabric of Theo’s shirt.

They stood so close, so comfortably, and Blaise couldn’t explain the sense of longing, of lust, of  _ love _ coursing like a wildfire through his veins, burning up his bones and reducing his senses to ash. 

“It was the most important thing.” 

_ The most important thing _ . Blaise repeated it internally to himself just as Theo repeated it out loud.

“You. And this. I couldn’t risk it.”

Theo didn’t look like he believed him, like the things Blaise confessed with such blind, agonizing sincerity couldn’t be anything but a direct tether to his heart. But then Theo smiled, a reluctant twitch at the corner of his mouth, and suddenly Blaise knew— he absolutely  _ knew _ — that something monumental had just shifted.

“I’m going to make you say it.” 

And so Blaise explained: the things he saw, was seeing, all wrapped up into a single moment. And then there were promises for more, a lifetime? 

But that thought evaporated when Theo kissed him. Blaise hadn’t really given much thought to his sexual preferences until that very moment. He’d certainly not thought of Theo in that way, even after they’d all had to endure Theo’s uncomfortable fascination with Draco’s post-Quidditch routines the year before.

But this. This hunger, this desire, this: Blaise’s first kiss and not even real. At least not yet.

And he understood the risk now, that feeling behind his breastbone that said nothing was more important than ensuring this moment existed in whatever version of the future came to pass.

The scene shifted, a slingshot forward, or maybe back. Experiments with women, with men, all of them barely breaking the surface tension of the pool Theo sank straight to the bottom of. 

A whip, a whirl. More, faster. 

War, pain, and absolute terror for Theo and the things that transpired in his home. 

Peace, punishment, and the tentative chance at healing. 

Theo: brilliant, hilarious, loyal Theo. Hiding in his horrible home and helping everyone but himself.

Cats and Christmas and kids Blaise knew and loved as if they were his own.

And it was over, ripped from his forebrain with the force of a failed obliviation that left memories behind instead of taking them away.

Blaise blinked. Draco and Theo were still huddled together, laughing at the fire dancing in Theo’s hand. It fluttered and died in a gust of summer breeze, alight no more.

Theo turned to him, a stupid, idiotic, beautiful smile plastered on his face.

“Hey Blaise,” he shouted as if he didn’t already have Blaise’s undivided, inadvisable attention. “Did you see that?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> UPDATE: there are now several additional stories in the w&h universe!  
> [Beginning and End](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25634758), a Draco POV prequel to w&h. (complete)  
> [Picked and Planted](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24946546), a Pansy POV post w&h one shot. (complete)  
> [The Couch Collection](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24581815), a collection of ficlets centered around our favorite piece of furniture. (wip)
> 
> \--
> 
> i had no intention of loving these two as much as i do when i started writing this. i hope i've been able to share even a fraction of that with you! i truly hope you've enjoyed reading this story! it's been a pleasure to write and i've loved it dearly!
> 
> unending thanks to icepower55 and EndlessMoonChild for beta support, moral support, and being generally all around wonderful human beings! 
> 
> if you're reading this on the weekend it's posted, i'm doing and AMA over on discord! follow the link to my tumblr before for more info on how to and come hang out with me and ask me questions about whatever you want!

**Author's Note:**

> i love and appreciate kudos and comments like you wouldn't believe! also, come hang out with me on [tumblr](http://mightbewriting.tumblr.com/), its a good time!
> 
> updates will be every friday afternoon!


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